Company

A few weeks back, I was invited to participate in the Gallery Players' first talk-back, appropriately titled GalleryTalk, which took place this weekend after one of the performances of the Gallery Players' production of Company.  I accepted the invitation for a number of reasons: The Gallery Players, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was one of those local theater collectives I'd always wondered about, driven past, heard positive things about. Plus, I was flattered to be asked, I am trying to sell my book, I am always happy to support a local theater company, and Company is one of my all-time favorite musicals. My only concern was that I've seen Company a lot, in some very shiny, expensive, highly publicized, star-studded productions...and, snob that I am, I expected that this production would be, at best, sweet and endearing in its amateurish inconsistencies, and, at worst--well, a lot worse than that.

I was dead wrong. Wronger than wrong. Stupidly, wonderfully, blessedly wrong. The Gallery Players put together an absolutely dynamite production of Company that rivaled--and, in some spots, transcended--those fancier ones I've seen. The show was a reminder not only of just how much white-hot talent there is in this city, but of how good theater--really, really good theater--trumps marketing, expensive stage gimmicks, shrewd publicists, and regular writeups in far-reaching newspapers.

The talkback? I think it went well, but frankly, the show was a tough act to follow, and that's as it should be. And alas, Company closed today; I could discuss the smart directorial choices, uniformly strong (and refreshingly, wonderfully unmiked) cast, great music direction, deft choreography, and terrific pit band, but you'd not be able to act on my demand that you go see Company at Brooklyn's Gallery Players RIGHT NOW, so I won't.

Instead, I'll encourage you to check out their website, which is here:  http://galleryplayers.com/, and to consider seeing a a future production. Company was only the first show of what looks to be an interesting, eclectic season. Check them out--they're worth it. Maybe I'll run into you at the concession stand during intermission.

Annie

Please note: This is not a traditional review. I saw Annie this past weekend, but shortly enough after the hurricane that I don't feel I can discuss it without my downbeat mood, compiled with my memories of the original production, coloring my opinions. So I offer this more personal essay about New York, the first production, and my experiences seeing the revival post-Sandy instead.
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The original Broadway production of Annie opened in late April, 1977, at the tail end of a season that featured a lot of very heavy, if also well-received, straight plays (including Mamet's American Buffalo and Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box), a lot of quickly forgotten, disappointing musicals (Ipi-Tombi, anyone?) and a few unspectacular revivals (Porgy and Bess and Fiddler, neither of which lasted terribly long). By the time Annie opened, critics had more or less given up on the season. As they did with Cy Coleman's I Love My Wife, which opened four days prior to Annie, a lot of the city's critics fell all over themselves with excitement upon encountering an original musical that was engaging, well-performed, upbeat, and reasonably entertaining. While I Love My Wife and Annie were vastly different shows--one was about partner swapping in Trenton, and the other focused on a redheaded orphan girl who finds a dog and gets adopted by a rich guy--they both quickly became big hits. Of the two, though, Annie easily took the cake: it ran for 2377 performances, and "Tomorrow," Annie's plaintive act-I paean to optimism, was positively ubiquitous through the rest of the decade.  

What's funny is that really, if you think about it, Annie is hardly the greatest show in the world--it's got a comic book-thin plot, strange pacing, a lot of really corny jokes, and a strong but perhaps not iconic score. In retrospect, what helped nudge Annie into the Broadway canon was its timing: not only did it come along at the tail end of a disappointing theater season, but also at a time when New York City was slowly but surely recovering from a genuinely terrifying financial crisis that cast a years-long pall over the city and negatively affected just about every aspect of city living. When Annie opened, just on the brighter side of near-bankruptcy, New York was in the process of reinventing itself into a stronger, cleaner, more tourist-friendly city. Annie captures some of that. The musical is all about New York, after all--and not just any New York, but one that sparkles and dazzles, rejuvinates and inspires; one whose inhabitants' dreams come true, one whose resources and riches flow directly to those who deserve it. Annie's New York is a Christmastime fairly land; those of its characters who keep a positive attitude and don't try to swindle one another are justly--and, quite literally, richly--rewarded.

Clearly, audiences loved the shiny, happy version of New York that Annie presented them. One of my earliest theater memories was seeing the original production of Annie, probably in 1978, when I would have been around nine, with my parents and younger sister. I can't remember the entire show clearly, of course, but the number "NYC"--and, even more so, the audience response to it--was a real high point. The number was big and energetic, and it filled the stage, and when it was over, the audience wouldn't stop applauding. And applauding. And applauding. And applauding. I don't think I've ever since seen a musical number stop a show like "NYC" stopped Annie. Finally, I nudged my dad, who sat to my right, and asked him what exactly was going on. "It's been a really rough time for New York, honey," he whispered back. "People are applauding the song, but they're also applauding the city."
 
If timing is everything, then Annie has it all, because it's about to open in revival during another really rough time for the city it depicts so optimistically. The past week has been particularly hard on New York and its people, in a number of ways. Sandy--the hurricane, not the dog--has destroyed property, houses, and in some cases entire neighborhoods. People have died. Systems we take for granted have slowed or stopped in ways ranging from inconvenient to deeply unsettling. I recognize that a natural disaster is not the same as a financial one, but sorrow is sorrow, and my city is, at the moment, as it was in the 1970s, a little bit broken, a little bit tentative, and very, very sad.

Five long, mood-swingy, restless days after the hurricane, 38 of us--neighbors, friends, family members, and many, many children ranging in age from 4 to 13--took a trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan to see a matinee of Annie, which is currently in previews at the Palace, and due to open this coming Thursday, November 8. We are all safe and sound, and thus we are a lucky bunch, but getting from one place to the other was not quite as easy as it usually is: there's a gas shortage here, now, so driving was more complicated than it might have been. The subways are rapidly coming back into service, but were, on Saturday, running through Brooklyn and then again above 34th street in Manhattan, and connected by shuttle buses that were either really great or utterly disastrous depending on your timing and your destination. Small inconveniences compared with those who lost their homes, I know. I didn't stop thinking about this as I sat with my friends and my neighbors and my daughter, all of us watching the show together, up in the balcony of the Palace Theater on Saturday afternoon.

While the grownup consensus was mixed, I think our children loved the show. Midway through act I, I looked behind me where, two rows up, my nine-year-old daughter sat in the middle of a row of ten or more of her buddies; they were as rapt through "Hard-Knock Life" as I am sure my sister and I were back in 1978. Even our group's toughest critic--a very serious four-year-old boy in a tie and a suit jacket who gave Annie a resolute 'thumbs-down' at the curtain call--was, according to his mother, overheard singing "Tomorrow" softly to himself later that evening.

The show itself? It was fine. Maybe a little flat. Maybe occasionally miscast. Maybe less relevant than I was hoping it would be for its time. And I admit to some disappointment over the fact that "NYC" did not prove to be the same showstopper that was back when I saw Annie in the 70s. But then again, my memories of seeing Annie as a child were so enormous, and so weirdly formulative--how could any revival, ever, compete? I am no longer nine. And, at least at the moment, I am many shades of sad. No show-stopper, however extended and ecstatic, could make this past week go away.

My own nine-year-old will preserve her own memories of Annie, if she chooses to. And whether or not the kids we took to the theater on Saturday remember seeing the show at all, I am quite certain that they will all always remember the week that a hurricane completely shut down New York. Really, then, who cares that the revival of Annie didn't strike me as quite the same kind of balm that its predecessor did? Crisis or not, New York isn't what it was in the late 1970s. And crisis or not, perhaps our children don't need a highly optimistic, glitzily staged reminder of just how wonderful, strong, and resilient their city is.  

You Will Make a Difference

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Photo by Charlie Winter

This Halloween, AliveWire Theatrics provides a sepulchral journey to self-discovery with You Will Make a Difference, a collaboratively created show more experiential than story oriented. This relentless string of unrelated scenarios offers the most chilling seasonal horror: truly bad theater.

Still, the opportunity to wander through the landmark West Park Presbyterian Church, built in 1889, makes this hodge-podge collection of material somewhat bearable. Conceived and directed by Jeremy Goren, the inaugural A/M/P Resident at AliveWire, the audience embarks on a theatrical adventure, following the performers through several floors of the darkened Romanesque Revival church—from its balcony to the musty basement—in a quest to understand exactly what is happening.

Taking inspiration from medieval pageant plays, the TV show “My So-Called Life,” Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the performer’s own stories, and other diverse sources, You Will Make a Difference, begins when the audience enters the sanctuary: a grandiose set itself. Rather than using the building to the show’s benefit, set designer Sandy Yaklin constructs an amateurish set, more appropriate for an elementary school play. The cast assembles in front of this Tree of Life facsimile and random scenes unfold: a tribal chant penetrates the silence, arms rise, bodies move, and lights flicker revealing silhouetted figures. More posing occurs than acting. Between the cloudy accents and the lack of a viable sound system, dialogue fades into a guttural verbalize. Lighting by Jess Greenberg fares better: Especially fun is the disco-like black lighting of the staircases near the show’s end, which allow the masking tape placed as a trail to reflect garishly.

As the performers finish this first vignette, disappearing in a swirl of song and dance, the audience, led by ushers’ flashlights, moves into a modern kitchen area. Again, performers arbitrarily come and go: a girl lies on the counter, another fiddles with the refrigerator door, someone else looks introspectively at the coffee pot. The silence becomes a long-winded burden, punctuated only by thumping footsteps, or the slam of a pot’s lid. Welcome to the most depressed collection of people in the world. Finally, the actors speak and, for a moment, the glorious voyeuristic pleasure of overhearing conversations sharpens the experience as a variety of characters (husband/wife, high schoolers, lovers) talk about pimples, the expendability of women, weekends, and other sundries. This feeling fades when the banality offers no resonance, no story, and no apparent reason for its utterance.

The remainder of the show takes the audience to the pits of the basement to see performers squirm their way around the peeling paint and the discarded furniture. Next, the gathering passes under a bridge of raised arms to spookily lit staircases to a ballroom area by the kitchen set where performers act like Hyde Park’s soapbox speakers, asking questions such as, “What is the American Dream?” and offering the thoughts of whatever persona captures their fancy. The show ends with a communal meal prepared by Artist/Chef Anne Apparu. After the marzipan candy, a fiddler plays hoedown and waltz music so audience and actors can dance with one another. Afterward, when the usher leading people out was asked: “How long does this go on?” She answered: “Until we drop of exhaustion.” Her line sums up best the You Will Make a Difference experience.

 (Press Ticket)

Performers:

Stephanie Eiss, Tara Elliott, Nicki Kontolefa, Jeff Kitrosser,  Laura Riveros, Derek Spaldo, & Martha Frances Liv Williams, Samantha Rivers Cole, Ben Lambert, Claire Lebowitz, Rishika Mehrishi, Courtney Ross, and a rotating group of guest performers

Performances from October 19th - November 11th, 2012

Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8pm

5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche

It's 1956, and we're all at the annual quiche breakfast of the Susan B. Anthony Society for the Sisters of Gertrude Stein, and the members of the society, widows all, are salivating with anticipation. That is ostensibly the premise of the highly entertaining 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche, written by Andrew Hobgood and Evan Linder and directed by Sarah Gitenstein. There is more here than meets the eye, however, and 5 Lesbians is better seen than explained. Try this: add the Five Lesbian Brothers (hmm, what is it about lesbians and the number 5?) to Steel Magnolias and Charles Busch, then subtract drag, and maybe you have a sense of 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche. Maybe.

Thea Lux, Caitlin Chuckta, Rachel Farmer, Megan Johns, Maari Suorsa

Photo: Dixie Sheridan

The show starts a little slow, treading familiar ground: food = sexual sublimation is not a new idea, nor is the concept of camp 1950's women. While the beginning is funny, it's nothing special. But then the atomic bomb explodes, and 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche goes someplace altogether different and does so with stylish insanity (insane style?).

[spoilers below]

Among its many strengths, 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche uses audience participation remarkably well. The audience is never badgered, and when the characters start asking people in the audience to announce that they are lesbians, they stick to men, where the announcement is automatically funny. And soon they have the whole audience announcing that they are lesbians, whether they are straight, bi, trans, gay, or, yes, lesbian. It is delightful, and for someone who came out in the 1977, it is also extremely moving. 

Oh, and the show has one of the funniest death scenes I have ever seen.

[end of spoilers]

So here's the bottom line: The writing varies from funny to hysterically funny (though I would cut five to ten minutes of the beginning), the direction is smart, and the acting is exactly what it should be, which I suppose is another way of saying perfect. (The performers are Caitlin Chuckta, Rachel Farmer, Megan Johns, Thea Lux, and Maari Suorsa.) No matter your gender or sexual orientation, if you're looking to spend 75 minutes laughing, 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche is for you. It's at the Soho Playhouse through late November.

(press ticket, 7th row center)

Spaceman

 Full disclosure: Shawn Davis, who plays the titular--if very briefly seen--character, is a good friend of mine.

Ostensibly, however, Spaceman (playing through Sunday, October 21 at St. Marks Theater and produced by Incubator Arts Project) is a one-woman show that focuses on Molly Jenkins, an astronaut on a mission to Mars. Molly's husband, Harry, disappeared some years earlier on a similar mission, and as much as she misses him, longs for him, mourns for him, Molly remains furious with him for taking that fatal spacewalk without remembering to attach his tether. That she would literally die to touch him again, despite her wrenching anger, is just one of the many dichotomies explored in this complicated, interesting play.

Ably played by Erin Treadway, Molly is a remarkably accomplished woman, once described by her chief competition for the chance to fly alone to Mars as "a machine" that he just couldn't beat. Yet, of course, she is not a machine; she is body, mind, and soul, and she's having increasing difficulty with all three as she hurdles through space. The spaceship, her home for months now, is increasingly confining, especially now that something is wrong with the air circulation and her space suit has begun to smell as horribly as she knows she does. The people she can communicate with back on Earth have begun to exhaust and irritate her; the further she gets from our planet, the more futile and stupid and doomed it  and everything on it seems. Her daily tasks are mind-numbingly dull. And while space is empty and perfectly silent, her capsule is almost unceasingly, irritatingly loud: there are beeps and pings and sirens and robotic voices and tinny human ones and, sometimes, almost unbearable feedback that shrieks forth from the many computers, radios, and consoles with no warning. Molly longs for silence and solitude, but at the same time desperately craves companionship, connections, and intimacy. The desires for both, conflicting though they may be, eventually begin to eat away at her in increasingly dangerous ways. So too do the connections between commerce and individual freedoms; love, loss, and death; ration and emotion; sanity and insanity; and, most compellingly, spirituality and science. This is a very small play that takes on and wrestles with absolutely huge dichotomies.

I am not convinced that it succeeds as well with some of them as it does with others--as noted above, the most carefully, satisfyingly explored topics relate to the (dis)connections between space-as-science and space-as-spirit-world, as well as to the drive to make meaning out of a human existence that can seem stupid at best, and pointless at worst. "False hope can be unbearable, but it's pointless to have no hope," Molly muses near the end of the show. Yes, and yes.

I've decided that I don't care, though, that some of the themes fall somewhat shorter than others; I'm too impressed with the attempt that the whole company makes to tackle such big subjects so creatively in the first place. And anyway, it's entirely possible that some of the musings simply went over my head. As my friend Jamie (also a friend of Shawn's, and my theatergoing companion) pointed out when I noted that I found the central love story--and the depiction of gender, really--to be ultimately too conventional, it's entirely possible that Molly's love and anger for her husband was more intricately, inversely related to her sanity than I'd considered. So seriously, what do I know? The fact that I'm asking that question is, to me, the mark that I've seen something challenging and worthwhile.

Indeed, Spaceman is very well done: Erin Treadway manages to portray a woman suffering from mind-altering solitude, loneliness, and claustrophobia without dragging the audience into the maddening boredom she experiences. The sharp direction, by Spaceman playwright Leegrid Stevens, works as well to keep the audience fully engaged in--and even fascinated by--Molly's numbingly mundane tasks, despite the fact that Treadway remains seated in her tiny (beautifully designed) spaceship for most of the 100-minute show. The sound design does exactly what it should, and the weightlessness and enormity of space are depicted ingeniously.

Spaceman closes this Sunday, which is too bad; it deserves to be taken seriously. I hope, too, that the people who put it together, all of them, get taken seriously, too.

"Hard Times" Available Now!

Hi, all. Forgive the shameless self-promotion, but the book I wrote, which is pictured above and which I blogged about in much more detail a few weeks back, is now available for purchase on Amazon, the Oxford University Press website, Barnes and Noble's website, and (maybe, if I'm really lucky) in the shrinking "theater" section of your finer, if also shrinking, local bookstores. Snag a copy, if you like, or, at the very least, page through the book online and seek out the occasional picture of nekkid actors!

Also, while I've got you: I've been on a theatergoing hiatus of late, because the start of a new semester manages to blindside me every time. But I've missed the theater, I've missed writing about what I've gone to see, and I've missed you! So I promise: I'll be back soon.