ART

Changing the sex of the characters in the workinggirls productions presentation of ART, the Yasmina Reza play that swept the 1998 awards season (Tony, New York Drama Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard awards, to name a few) makes the dialogue more brittle somehow. The play, which shows how a simple artwork purchase can dismember a friendship as conversations question what should be valued, transforms into a mean girls reality show: Real Women Debate Art.

The original Broadway cast included Alan Alda, Victor Garber and Alfred Molina, and went on to play 600 performances. This new version, directed by Michael Colby Jones, ran for a mere handful of shows and closed last week. Still, it’s worth mentioning because adding the female presence changes the drama, adding another element to the musings on long-term friendship the play usually provides. Certainly, friendship among women is as complex and messy as with men. And this version hints that amid the power of female bonding lies an underbelly of ugliness, moreso than in the original. The Broadway version focused on three friends: Serge (Garber), who purchases a modernistic, expensive painting that looks like a white canvas with a few wavering lines. Marc (Alda) as the friend who upsets the tranquility with his constant questioning on the wisdom of the sale, and Serge (Molina) who acts as the mediator. In the workinggirls adaptation the plot was similar with Serge becoming Sevrine (Christine Ann Sullivan), Marc morphing into Claire (Anna Pond) and the Molina role goes to Duvall O’Steen as Yvonne (Yvan in the original).

ART doesn’t just address the aesthetics question; it inquires how long-term friendships change as one-time cohorts deviate in their belief systems. Can a friendship last when the nature of it alters? And, can friends forgive each other for the string of unknown slights that follows us as the years pass by? The 90-minute satire worked perfectly in the tight, sparse space in The Alchemical Theatre Laboratory that basically turned a small couch and two swivel chairs into rooms that prickled with the friends’ growing hostility. Yvonne, a nervous bride, was all rounded shoulders and furrowed brow as she squirmed into stories about battling relatives, only standing fully erect when she channeled her unsupportive mother—imitating her as if she were Katharine Hepburn smoking a cigarette. Yvonne’s helplessness piqued Claire and Sevrine as their animosity toward each other was temporarily alleviated through a joint barrage of abuse hurled at her. Sevrine, the intellectual, seemed placid and remote, even when angry, and provided a cool contrast to Claire, who was partial to bitter and breathless diatribes. In the original, the unraveling of the three friends did not seem so harsh; the words spoken in a male voice did not feel as unrelenting and cruel and I wonder if the glorification of female friendship makes the dismantling of it more tender. For the resonance of what could be lost seems tougher in this version, and because of this the resolution becomes less believable; It seems like too much has aired to find repair.

Something Wild

By deciding to present in one evening three grueling Tennessee Williams one-acts--27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Hello From Bertha, and This Property Is Condemned--director Ken Schatz has set a major challenge for himself and the Pook's Hill theatre company. Unfortunately, in Something Wild, Schatz et al. only intermittently meet that challenge.

Brian Gianci, Samantha Steinmetz
Photo: Cecilia Senocak

The most successful of the three plays is 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, which is anchored by a brave, moving, odd performance by Samantha Steinmetz as Flora, a none-too-bright woman caught between two manipulative, angry, and violent men. Hello From Bertha, more of an exercise or character study than a play, feels endless; nothing happens, nothing changes, and the cast does not make it compelling. This Property Is Condemned is also a character study and also not particularly compelling. However, the character has echos of Blanche DuBois, and it is interesting to watch Williams riff on his themes of loneliness and loss.

Something Wild's main problem is that these three plays are too much for one evening, particularly without an intermission. 27 Wagons Full of Cotton delivers a large helping of anxiety and horror, and the other two plays, although less-well-written and less-well-acted, also serve up a tremendous amount of pain. In addition, the latter two plays are too similar in structure, both being virtual monologues by unhappy, hopeless women. After a while, the production begins to feel assaultive. When the evening was over, I felt like I needed an emergency comedy.

Another issue is that the theatre has audience on three sides but the plays are directed only for the people in the middle. For extended periods of time, actors speak too softly, block each other from view, or never face one or both sides. This is disrespectful of two thirds of the audience.

Something Wild does have one important achievement to its credit; by and large, the evening captures the Tennessee Williams-ness of the plays.

(press ticket; second row center)

Job

Sean McIntyre, Adam Lebowitz-Lockard

Photo: Hunter Canning

The story of Job in the bible is one of the weirder episodes in a book full of weird episodes, and in The Flea Theater's production of Job, featuring The Flea's resident theatre troupe, The Bats, playwright Thomas Bradshaw and director Benjamin H. Kamine leave no weirdness unturned. Bradshaw uses humor and violence to emphasize the creepy casualness of a God who plays with his subjects with no more concern than a kid burning ants with magnified sunlight. And Job, who is visited with some truly baroque afflictions, is ostensibly one of God's favorites! If that's how God treats him, just imagine how he might treat the rest of us. (Oh, yeah, floods, plagues, boils, Mitt Romney.)

Bradshaw's God is a somewhat mellow guy who meditates and hangs out with his two favorite sons, Jesus and Dionysus. This relative mellowness makes even more chilling his decision to allow his brother Satan to torture Job so that he can win a bet. Job's pain and suffering are incidental. This God is worse than a vengeful God; he is a careless God.

When God eventually restores to Job most of what was taken from him, God says, "I’m going to send him a new wife, and they’ll have six children, twice as many as he had before." Here again, humans are just playthings, and God seems to think that Job's first wife and three children can be replaced as easily as camels and sheep. 

But Job doesn't come out looking so wonderful either. He is pompous and self-satisfied and dripping with a sense of entitlement, and he is also capable of great violence. In this way he seems truly formed in his maker's image.

Bradshaw's play is interesting, thought-provoking, and vivid. It is also, in this production, one of the most unpleasant evenings I have ever spent in a theatre. I get that Bradshaw and Kamine want us to feel the horrors that occur, but watching murder, rape, and necrophilia in an extremely small space is just too much. It becomes violence porn, with effects for the sake of effects. The violence is well-done--kudos to fight director Michael Wieser--but it is also overdone, and gratuitous. While the suggestion of violence can horrify a theatre audience, this level of carnage replaces the emotional response with horror-movie-level--bad horror-movie-level--shock.

Another problem is that Job is 20 minutes of material stretched to about an hour. Perhaps this is one reason that the violence is depicted in such loving, time-consuming detail.

Bradshaw is know as a  provocateur. In this case I think he let the faux provocation of icky effects outweigh the genuine provocation of depicting a God loved by millions as self-centered and totally lacking compassion.

(third row center; press ticket)

Mary Broome

Janie Brookshire, Roderick Hill
Photo: Carol Rosegg

1911. The upper-crust Timbrells gather in the drawing room to discuss the wedding of Edgar, the oldest brother, to his beloved Sheila. As always, ne'er-do-well younger brother Leonard annoys everyone with his sarcasm and condescension. Various family members get into arguments that have clearly been argued before. The evening seems destined to continue along this path until the maid, Mary Broome, quietly announces that she is pregnant. Leonard is the father.

Most of what happens next in Allan Monkhouse's 1911 comedy-drama will surprise few people in the audience, but that doesn't mean that the play isn't worth seeing. It's never boring, and it circles around, if never quite lands on, some astute insights. It's almost as though Monkhouse was dimly aware of human psychology, feminism, and changing societal mores, but didn't quite know what to do with these juicy concepts.

The Mint Theater Company's production of Mary Broome is handsome and smooth. The drawing room is festooned with family portraits that give a strong sense of a family rooted in years of expectations and limitations (although the decision to change them as the play progresses is inappropriately cartoony). The costumes are attractive and effective. The direction, by Jonathan Bank, is solid, except for the major misstep of casting Roderick Hill as Leonard. Leonard is an obnoxious character who needs to be played with charm and/or complexity to be anything other than an ongoing irritant. And if Leonard is flat, as he is in Hill's portrayal, then the whole play is deflated.  Janie Brookshire, on the other hand, does well at giving Mary Broome three dimensions.

It's fascinating to compare today's plays of those of 100 years ago. The pressure on playwrights to keep casts small has changed contemporary writing, as has the trend toward 90 minutes, no intermission. The result is streamlined plays with the need to make every word count. The more meandering plays of yesteryear seem almost profligate in comparison, taking their time and including characters that are not central to the story. One of the many reasons that the Mint is invaluable is the opportunity to see first-hand how the shape of theatre has evolved over the years.

(fifth row center, press ticket)

Strange Tales of Liaozhai

You walk into the theatre carefully, skirting the floor-level stage, which is covered with gorgeous patterned silks and parasols and glittering chains of reflective circles. You take your seat and are then presented with the Strange Tales of Liaozhai, one tale about a collector of pigeons, another about love, more or less.

Jane Wang
Photo: Richard Termine

The first story is told by a man we do not see as Hannah Wasileski's lovely and evocative projections gradually appear and then melt away. The second is narrated by a woman who is not present as a character but who is quietly and unobtrusively active at the side wall, manipulating strings and alchemizing the panels of silk and brocade, parasols, and glittering chains into a variety of characters while speaking the narration into a headset. This is renowned theatre artist Hanne Tierney, who is the creator of the concept, text, and puppets and also a formidable multitasker.

There are some beautiful things here. The glittering chains are magical. There are moments in which the cloth panels ease into elegant, graceful shapes in a sort of origami-in-motion. The music, composed by Jane Wang and played by her on double bass, toy piano, and various stainless steel instruments of her own invention, provides a fluid, remarkable soundscape.

Strange Tales of Liaozhai represents such thoughtfulness, talent, and hard work that I really wanted to love it, or even like it. But the sad truth is that I spent much of the time bored. (Many people in the audience clearly enjoyed the show much more than I did.) Everything moves very slowly--even more slowly, I think, than is necessitated by the physical requirements of the projections and puppetry. Neither story is particularly compelling, and while many of the visuals are impressive, they aren't emotionally engaging. I will gladly stipulate that Strange Tales of Liaozhai is an impressive work of art, but I just didn't care.

(Second row center, press ticket.)

So Long, Farewell, Colony Records

Colony Records, that old sheet music and sound recording mecca that has resided on the corner of 49th and Broadway in Times Square since 1970 (and, before that, on 52nd Street, where it first opened in 1948) is going out of business on Saturday, September 15th.

I was asked a few weeks back to blog about the significance of its demise for Oxford University Press, which is publishing my book, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City in October. More on the book in a later post, I promise. For now, I wanted to call attention to the store's closing, and to my post about it. Check out the OUP blog post below--and if you are local, please stop in at Colony to say goodbye. It's a sad pilgrimage, to be sure, but one I bet you'll be glad you made.

COLONY