Tribes

It's always dangerous to see a show after hearing weeks of hype. Expectations are tricky things. But Tribes is every bit as good as everyone says it is.

Billy is the only deaf person in his family. His parents decided years ago to have Billy taught lip-reading rather than sign language to keep him in the mainstream world. Billy's parents are both writers; his father is a pompous know-it-all who claims to debate people for fun but really needs to hold people down. Billy's sister Ruth is an opera singer; his brother Daniel, who is working on his PhD, is schizophrenic.

Looking at this description coldly, it seems that author Nina Raine made some heavy-handed decisions. After all, giving Billy language-oriented parents and a singing sister would seem to over-emphasize any points she makes about Billy's life. And isn't Daniel's schizophrenia maybe one thing too many for a show to take on? In lesser hands, these might be problematic issues; in Raine's hands, they are not. Raine grounds her show in believable humanity and lets any issues take care of themselves.

When Billy becomes involved with Sylvia--who is going deaf and who teaches him sign language--every button in the family becomes pressed. The father looks down on sign as a lesser language and condescends to Sylvia every chance he gets. The mother wonders if she hobbled Billy's life by not teaching him sign earlier. And brother Daniel, who feels closer to Billy than anyone else on earth, is frightened of Billy having a life outside the family.

Between them, author Raine and director David Cromer make Tribes a beautifully theatrical experience. The audience is vividly brought into the family's lives and limits. There are moments--carefully chosen and very well-done--where we, like the family, cannot perceive what is going on.

The one serious limitation of the show is that it is done in the round, so everyone is always seeing someone's back. I feel like I only saw Mare Winningham's face three or four times and so was cut off from much of her performance. If this was a deliberate decision, to have the audience struggle to keep up, it's a problematic one. There's a difference between carefully chosen moments of incomprehension and not knowing what's going on. However, this problem isn't enough to totally destroy play's brilliance.

Jeff Perry as the bombastic father is so convincing that I wanted to slap him. Winningham is, I think, quite good, but as I said, I didn't see much of her performance. Nick Westrate and Gayle Ranking, as the Billy's brother and sister, are both quite effective. The most outstanding performance, however, is given by Susan Pourfar as Sylvia; she manages to be both vivid and subtle, strong and heart-breaking.

Tribes is as good as they say. It's running through September 2.

(Fifth row near a wall; tdf ticket.)

The Columnist

The Columnist, by David Auburn, is a smart, straightforward bio-play, with the juicy, juicy starring role of Joseph Alsop, the nationally syndicated columnist who both reported and made history from the 1930s through the 1970s. How lucky for Auburn--and for us--that John Lithgow took the role.

Lithgow has had an amazing career, with success in theatre (plays and musicals), TV, movies, and writing (books and librettos), all of it much deserved. He gets to the marrow of the characters he plays, and no matter how sympathetic he may make them, he never ignores their dark sides. In other words, he gives us multi-dimensional humans in all their complexity.

In The Columnist, he has a role that calls on all his skills and insight, and it's a pleasure to see him strut his stuff. The look on his face when he realizes that someone may actually want him for himself. How he relies on his pride to cover his pain. His anger when he's crossed. His heartbreak when his friend JFK is assassinated. His stubborn insistence that the math proves that it's worth losing 100 Americans in Vietnam to kill 400 Vietnamese.

While The Columnist suffers from the weaknesses of the genre (few people are kind enough to live lives that offer good dramatic arcs), it's consistently interesting, and director Daniel Sullivan keeps it moving right along. The supporting cast is strong. The sets by John Lee Beatty are effective and attractive, and Kenneth Posner's lighting provides impressive yet subtle support to the changing moods of the show. But The Columnist is ultimately about the columnist, and Lithgow is the overarching reason to see this show. If you want to see some exquisite acting, move quickly--it closes on July 8.

(Fifth row; press ticket)

Dropped Names by Frank Langella (book review)

I love gossip. I love knowing who's sleeping with who and why X isn't talking to Z. But there is a limit. And, in his new memoir, Dropped Names, Frank Langella goes well past it.

The book is aptly named. Langella drops dozens of names: people he worked with and/or slept with or even just met once in passing (and, in one truly odd vignette, someone he never met yet compared penis sizes with). Marilyn Monroe. Rita Hayworth. Elizabeth Taylor. Montgomery Clift. Lee Strassberg. Laurence Olivier. And he pulls no punches--even punches that really should be pulled. He calls actors second-rate, tells who never picks up the check, and shares very very private moments. He says that he did two awful things to Jackie Kennedy and seems totally unaware that in writing about her now, he's doing a third.

There's something deeply icky about the whole endeavor. He writes only about dead people (with one exception). Is it (1) to spare their feelings? or (2) to deny them a chance to tell their side of the story? Even if it's choice (1), his choice to expose people who believed him to be a friend is creepy.

To Langella's credit, he knows that he's arrogant and somewhat closed down. But he doesn't seem to understand that he's also a user. And a shit.

Gossip is fun at a party when a stagehand or production assistant tipsily shares anecdotes of the great and/or famous. But for a peer to do it--someone who claims to have loved many of these people--and to do it in print, and to do it for profit, is repulsive. I'm glad I took the book out of the library and didn't contribute to his cheerful selling out of his old friends.

3C

What were they thinking?

There are two ways to interpret this question. In the first, it's preceded by a silent "Are they nuts?" And that interpretation is certainly apt in relation to David Adjmi's relentless and unpleasant play 3C.

But in the second interpretation, it's a straightforward question. What were they thinking? For example, what did Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the usually wonderful Bill Buell, and the impressive-even-in-this-mess Hannah Cabell see in this show that made them want to do it?

Maybe they fell for this description (from the press release):

The war in Vietnam is over and Brad, an ex-serviceman, lands in L.A. to start a new life. When he winds up trashed in Connie and Linda’s kitchen after a wild night of partying, the three strike a deal for an arrangement that has hilarious and devastating consequences for everyone. Or are they non-consequences?  Inspired by 1970s sitcoms, 1950s existentialist comedy, Chekhov, and Disco anthems, 3C is a terrifying yet amusing look at a culture that likes to amuse itself, even as it teeters on the brink of ruin.

However, that paragraph in no way describes the painfully overdone, cutesy, pointless, ten-minute-skit-stretched-to-ninety-minutes show performed tonight. The supposed Chekhov moments and existentialist comedy aren't there, and 3C is certainly not hilarious, amusing, or terrifying. Instead, the show's tiresome, heavy-handed takeoff of Three's Company tries to buy some significance through long moments of cast members sitting and staring grimly (long moments) and bits of confused sexuality. It's not enough. Director Jackson Gay might have helped by varying the pacing and lowering the hysteria a bit, but she went for a balls-to-the-wall approach that is, to coin a phrase, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The set is nice. In a game called "Faces," where characters challenge each other to express various emotions, Hannah Cabell offers a lovely display of acting technique. Kate Buddeke manages some moments of real emotion as the miserably unhappy wife of the landlord. That's it.

(Oh, and if you want people to read up on your show, don't choose an Google-challenged name like 3C.)

(Fifth row, press ticket.)

The Etiquette of Death

Photo by: Ves Pitts

Caption: Chris Tanner as Joan Girdler (standing) and Everett Quinton as Death.

The premiere of Chris Tanner’s heavy-handed farce, The Etiquette of Death at the Ellen Stewart Theatre, explores the darkness and despair—and the occasional humorous moments—the loss of life brings: a fitting topic to close La MaMa’s 50^th Anniversary season since Ellen Stewart, the “mama” of La MaMa passed away last year.

Tanner, part of La Mama since 1979, creates a collaborative on death with 20 other writers and composers, including Penny Arcade, Angela DiCarlo, Jeremy X. Halpern (also the keyboardist), John Jesurun, Penny Rockwell and Tony Stavick. In Etiquette, death becomes an extravaganza: a variety show of sorts, chock full of glittery costumes, cross-dressing, and, song and dance. Amid all this absurdity, the authors attempt to imbue meaning by offering insinuations, conversations, and soliloquies on the importance of appearances, class, the horror of AIDS, and the sadness of loss, among other topics. The ambitiousness of the project, ultimately, generates an overall messiness where narratives and characters stay unconnected and, often, seem erratic.

The loose storyline introduces Joan Girdler (Tanner), a blonde bee-hived Mary Kay incarnate with sometimes questionable ethics, who is caring for her dying son (Brandon Olson) as she struggles with her own Stage 4 brain cancer diagnosis. Girdler, a regional sales manager of Etiquette Cosmetics, also hosts a TV show that offers etiquette and makeup tips. Death (a leather clad, Cher-haired Everett Quinton, who also directs the musical) is a big fan of hers. Scattered throughout the main action, “death” vignettes showcase ancillary characters discussing gangrene and the importance of bringing the right food to a Southern funeral, a chorus of dancing pigeons, and, a funny bit where two characters eat in a restaurant run by Death’s hench-bitches (Machine Dazzle and Matthew Crosland in brief costumes that showcase their to-die-for legs). What the sideshow of anguish and provocation means isn’t always apparent: Why are the pigeons eating Kentucky Fried Chicken? Why use a Grecian-looking set with columns and a bridge that entering actors must duck under? Why portray Isis, an Egyptian goddess who protects the dead, as Death’s cohort? Often, Etiquette offers more shoulder shrugging “huh” than “a-ha.” moments.

The performances span from the good, the bad, and the ugly. Quinton, best known for his work during his two-plus decades with The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, plays death with a campy fierceness, yet still manages to instill a human fragility in (her? him?) during a hopeful but disastrous makeover. Greta Jane Pedersen embodies Isis as a modern-day cabaret chanteuse with a pixie cut and bright red lipstick, who simultaneously channels Norah Jones, Edith Piaf, and Natalie Merchant. Pedersen’s singing mesmerizes and makes Etiquette’s two-hour-and-a-half run time bearable.

Choreography, though, by Julie Atlas Muz offers uninspiring efforts that invoke a high-school dance recital and, often, the singing is off-key. Sound problems in the performance I attended periodically made dialogue and lyrics indiscernible. With clichéd lines such as, “Without death, life would lose its poetry” and the tongue-in-cheek finale chorus, “We’re all gonna die,” this might not be a loss

(General seating, press ticket).

The Etiquette of Death plays from June 14-July 1 at the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La Mama.

The Bad and the Better

Jordan Tisdale, William Apps
Photo: Monica Simoes

The Amoralists love to yell, and they do it well. In their shows, usually written by the smart and wry Derek Ahonen, people live operatically, full of big emotions, deep cravings, and endless questions about their place in the universe. In his sprawling noir, The Bad and the Better, Ahonen gives us a world  in which desire is sudden and intense, you can't tell the bad guys from the better, and no one lives at less than 100 miles an hour.

Lang (the always-wonderful William Apps) is a cop stuck at a desk job, maybe a hero, maybe not. Venus (David Nash) is a playwright doing research on revolutionaries. Sweet anarchist Faye (the extraordinary Anna Stromberg) falls in love with Venus, but the other anarchists aren't sure they trust him. Real estate developer Zorn (Clyde Baldo) basically owns politician Eugene Moretti (the perfectly silly David Lanson). Julio (Jordan Tisdale) is a young police officer. Lenny (Penny Bittone) is an older cop trying to balance love and integrity. Matilda (the delightful Cassandra Paras) is a bartender at a cop bar. Miss Hollis (Sarah Lemp) is a secretary in love with her boss.

What do these characters all have to do with one another? Finding out is a great deal of the fun in The Bad and the Better. 

Director Daniel Aukin keeps The Bad and the Better moving like the proverbial well-oiled machine. New scenes begin almost before the previous scenes end. People flow on and off stage quickly and often. The production is big and energetic and very funny. 

The design aspects of the show are all top-notch. Kudos to set designer Alfred Schatz, costume designer Moria Clinton, lighting designer Natalie Robin, sound designer Phil Carluzzo, and fight choreographer Lisa Kopitsky.

The show's faults are few. A couple of actors are hard to understand. Some lose their characters under their bluster (but most don't, which is impressive in light of the operatic theatricality of the piece). Sometimes it's hard to follow the plot (though that seems to be a tradition in noirs going back to The Big Sleep). The play's ending pushes the moral a bit much. But overall, this show is a highly successful treat.

(second row; press ticket)