Intimacy

I guess Thomas Bradshaw was aiming for satire when he wrote the dreadful and stupid Intimacy, but satire requires a point of view, intelligence, and more discernment than shown by, say, a bunch of 11-year-olds telling dirty jokes. Scott Elliot's heavy-handed direction helps not at all. 

Intimacy is about sex, and a great deal of sex occurs during its long two hours. The sex involves various organs, positions, and people, including family members, and is performed on stage, on film, and with various prostheses. I guess it's supposed to be funny; it isn't. I guess it's supposed to be shocking; it isn't. I guess it's supposed to mean something; nope.

I like one idea that manages to poke through, that sex can be healing. And I thought the ejaculation mechanism was far superior to the vomiting mechanism in Gods of Carnage. That's it for positives.

Intimacy is puerile, pointless, empty, and stupid. My tickets were free, but I'd sure like the two hours of my life back.

(press ticket; in the theatre, unfortunately)

Row After Row

Jessica Dickey's Row After Row sneaks up on you. The story seems simple: three Civil War re-enactors share a table in a bar following a re-creation of the battle of Gettysburg. Tom and Cal are old friends and experienced re-enactors. Leah is new in town and has joined the re-enactors in a bid to meet people. Cal is horrified both at her having played a soldier and at her having done so in non-period-appropriate clothing. Leah explains, "I didn’t feel like playing the serving wench or a widowed bride or whatever." Cal is derisive and downright rude, calling the new rules that allow women to dress as men, "mamby pamby bullshit." He also explains that it can cost thousands of dollars to get all of the necessary garb and equipment to be an authentic re-enactor. Tom adds, "Most people don’t realize the commitment goes beyond sleeping in a tent and wearing wool in July." Leah and Cal spar, with Tom trying to play peacemaker.

Rosie Benton, Erik Lochtefeld. P.J. Sosko
Photo: Carol Rosegg

Cal is recovering from a brutal breakup and isn't quite the jerk he seems. For all of his belligerence, he listens when Leah speaks.  Leah, who chose to move to Gettysburg by putting her finger "on the map one drunken night about three weeks ago," is mourning her vanished career as a dancer. Tom, a teacher with a son about to be born, and barely scraping by, is deciding whether to go on strike with his union, torn between loyalty to his family and to his coworkers, between principles and fear.

Although the play initially seems to be an entertaining battle of the sexes, with feminist flavoring and even a touch of "meet cute," Dickey has more on her mind. By its end, Row After Row has revealed itself as a serious, thought-provoking, and occasionally chilling examination of bravery, integrity, manhood, and womanhood that is also very funny.

The Bridges of Madison County

It's the moment. The lonely Italian-born Iowan housewife and the dashing photographer dance. And the audience's focus is pulled onto a neighbor, singing.

It's another moment. Their love is growing. And focus is pulled onto a skeletal faux bridge being lowered.

Still another moment. And focus is pulled onto the four store fronts being rolled onstage. Or the kitchen coming in. Or the fake car being put in place. Or the people at the country fair. Etc, etc, etc.

The Bridges of Madison County in its various incarnations is a testament to mush. It's cliched, silly, predictable, corny, and trite. Well-done, it can also be ridiculously affecting, a major tear-jerker. But you have to embrace the mush, focus on the mush, honor the mush, trust the mush.

The often-brilliant Bartlett Sher, director of the musical version of The Bridges of Madison County, does everything he can to distract from the mush. His direction is busy, overthought, and overdone. It takes the slight but sweet story at the center of the show and buries it under motion and scenery and tangents. Composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown and Marsha Norman are guilty as well; they have stuffed this souffle of a show with so many ingredients that it has no chance of rising. But Sher makes it even worse, never letting the story settle for even a minute or two.

Grounded

Hannah Cabell
Photo: Rob Strong

The Pilot's name doesn't matter because being a pilot is absolutely what she is, over all other forms of identification. She lives to fly "My Tiger/My gal who cradles me lifts me up." She also rains destruction

on the minarets and concrete below me
The structures that break up the sand
I break them back down
Return them to desert
To particles
Sand
At least I think I do
I'm long gone by the time the boom happens
Tiger and I are on to another piece of sky

She doesn't date much: "Most guys don't like what I do/Feel they're less of a guy around me/I take the guy spot and they don't know where they belong." But then she meets Eric:

This one’s eyes light up
This one thinks it's cool
This one kisses me in the parking lot like I'm the rock
star I am

My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer

Katherine Folk-Sullivan (left) and Layla Khoshnoudi (right)
Photo credit: Hunter Canning

With a 65 minute run time, Brian Watkins' My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer is a short and provocative one act play.  It is well worth your time.

The premise is one that the typical New Yorker or urbanite will find foreign.  Two sisters, both college uneducated, living in the middle of a prairie out West.  The elder sister Sarah is burdened with maintaining the family home/land and caring for her ailing mother and a lone sheep named Vicky, while the younger sister Hannah works every day at a roadside diner wrestling with a mild wanderlust and an Isuzu that won't take her anywhere.  Yet its very foreignness is what makes the play all the more poignant when you start to relate to these characters.

The story is told through a series of monologues by the two sisters.  As they state at the beginning, they don't talk much to each other, even as they recall the same events.  Estranged by bitterness, jealousy, and the memories of happier times, Sarah and Hannah's relationship is simultaneously archetypal and personal.  The raw honesty and frequently irreverent humor of their stories highlight the deeper, darker things that often motivate actions.  The strength of this work lies in the characters' step-by-step decisions and tiny explosions of violence, which have the power to transform us from humans with delusions of moral decency to stumbling unrecognizable creatures.  (I once heard a variant of that phrase used with regards to Breaking Bad...it seemed applicable here.)

I'll leave my description at that because I don't want to give too much away.  Production-wise, the choreography of light was quite brilliant (Was that too punny?) - from flashlight to overhead lamp to flame.  The performance by Katherine Folk-Sullivan (Sarah) was top notch.  She especially shone in the moments when Hannah was speaking and you could see the play of emotions across her face.  Layla Khoshnoudi was delightfully funny and insightful as Hannah.

This was my first Off-Off-Broadway play.  I loved the intimacy of the theatre (only two rows of seats), but it was a very wide stage which made views slightly uncomfortable.  Granted, I was sitting at the end of a row.  I kind of wonder if this play might work in the round...but, random musings.   Final verdict: I highly recommend it.  This is a journey worth going on with Sarah and Hannah.

My Daughter Keeps Our Hammer is playing at The Flea Theater (41 White Street) through February 15.

(press ticket, second row, far left)

Russian theater parody

Good people, have you seen this? Because if you haven't, you must. Go. Go now. Watch. It's as good and as brilliant and as effective as this--if not more so.




You're welcome.