Take Me Back

The not-quite-accurate publicity synopsis for Emily Schwend's new play Take Me Back goes as follows:

James Kautz
Photo: Russ Rowland

After a four-year stint in federal prison, Bill is back at home, living with his diabetic Mom and looking for a way out of Oklahoma. But today's America doesn't give a guy like Bill many options. How far is he willing to go to change his fortune? With a dose of melancholic nostalgia infused with dark humor, Take Me Back examines the impossibility of the American dream when surrounded by nothing but minimum wage Big Box stores and chain restaurants.

I would have liked to see that play. Instead, Take Me Back is another story about a jerky guy who is so committed to being a jerky guy that he cannot resist the opportunity to be, well, a jerky guy.

Nothing on Earth (Can Hold Houdini)

Axis Company's Nothing on Earth (Can Hold Houdini), written and directed by artistic director Randy Sharp, has all the ingredients of a fascinating and thought-provoking thriller. Harry Houdini! Arthur Conan Doyle! Seances! Con artists! Yet the show is remarkably uninteresting, with 75 minutes of confusing build-up and 10 minutes of cop-out denouement.

Harry Houdini

Houdini, in addition to being an accomplished magician and the world's foremost escape artist, was devoted to exposing the tricks behind ostensible supernatural abilities. In contrast, Doyle, who was desperate to communicate with his late son, believed in spiritualism, fairies, automatic writing, and ectoplasm. Doyle was even convinced that Houdini himself had supernatural powers, despite Houdini's insistence that his tricks were just that: tricks. Their differences eventually destroyed their friendship. (It helps if you go in knowing this--and more--since the exposition is unfocused and unclear.)

Nothing on Earth begins in total darkness. (No exit signs? Is that even legal?) We see a ghostly figure float by. We hear spirits signaling their presence by pressing buzzers. And then the seance is cut short as Houdini turns on the lights and proceeds to explain how each effect was created: no spirits here.

By the time we get to the climactic seance. led by then-famous medium Mina (Margery) Crandon, we have heard many letters from Houdini to his wife, seen debates between Houdini and Doyle, and gotten a peek behind the scenes at the Crandons, all presented badly, with missing information, unsuccessful overlapping of dialogue, and a generally boring sloppiness.

Love and Information

Part sketch comedy, part minimalist drama(s), Caryl Churchill's Love and Information is unlike any show I've seen. Consisting of dozens of playlets, some barely a minute long, Love and Information amasses emotion, insight, and yearning bit by bit, line by line.

Top row: Irene Sofia Lucio, Noah Galvin
Bottom row: Karen Kandel, Adante Power, Zoë Winters,
James Waterston, Lucas Caleb Rooney
Photo: Joan Marcus

Take, for example, this section, called "Grief."

Are you sleeping?

I wake up early but that’s all right in the summer.

Eating?

Oh enough. Dont fuss.

I’ve never had someone die.

I’m sorry, I’ve nothing to say. Nothing seems very interesting.

He must have meant everything to you.

Maybe. We’ll see.

That's it. That's the whole thing, verbatim. In the New York Theatre Workshop production (at the Minetta Lane), which is beautifully directed by James MacDonald, it's performed by a young woman sitting in a chair and an older women on the floor, folding and putting away sweaters. It is a masterpiece of concision--one of many!

The Correspondent

A door opens and closes, and two people walk into an expensive but messy apartment. The man, Philip (Thomas Jay Ryan), is in his 50s, white, well-off--the owner of the apartment. The woman, Mirabel (Heather Alicia Simms), is African-American, much younger, wearing an old jacket and carrying a backpack. They clearly do not know each other well. It is hard to guess what their relationship might be. And it's even harder to accept what it is.

Thomas Jay Ryan
Photo: Joan Marcus

Mirable is dying, and she has agreed to take a message from Philip to his late wife, Charlotte, killed just a couple of weeks ago in an accident. Philip has unfinished business with Charlotte: he's desperate to know if she forgives him for the awful fight they had just before she died.

Philip pays Mirable. She leaves. And the next night a letter appears in his hallway. A letter from Charlotte, full of things only she could know.

The Correspondent, slyly written by Ken Urban and smartly directed by Stephen Brackett, proceeds to take Philip and the audience on an intriguing and twisted journey, full of unanswerable questions. For the audience, the questions come in two categories. First, what are the characters up to? Who, if anyone, is telling the truth? Second, what is Urban up to? Is he trying to be thought-provoking or to thrill--or both? Do these goals get in each other's way?

I suspect that the answers to these questions will differ from viewer to viewer.

For this viewer, The Correspondent, at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, doesn't hold up to much next-day analysis, but that's okay. It's a well-constructed, largely entertaining, and mostly satisfying 90 minutes, and I enjoyed taking the twisted journey.

(third row, press ticket)

Book review: Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History.

No Broadway show in recent memory elicited a more potent blend of scapegoating and Schadenfreude than Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which was conceived in 2002 by producer Tony Adams, scored by U2's Bono and The Edge, written by Glen Berger and Julie Taymor (and, later, sort of, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa), directed by Taymor (and, later, sort of, William Philip McKinley), and which opened at the Foxwoods Theater on 14 June 2011. Between its conception and its opening night, the show went through enough trials and tribulations to make Job look like a dude who just hit a brief bad patch.

The efforts it took to get Spider-Man to the stage are the stuff of Broadway legend. It took three years to work out the creative team's contracts, and just as they were finally all being signed in The Edge's New York apartment, Tony Adams suffered a massive stroke and died. No joke. While Edge was looking around for a pen. Seriously. Rather than reading this as an omen and running, screaming, from the project, Adams' producing partner, Alan Garfinkle, took over as lead producer, but he had no Broadway experience, and the production soon ran out of money. Bono's friend, the rock impresario Michael Cohl, also chose not to run screaming from the project; instead, he came in as lead producer in 2009, just in time for the economy to tank. More money for Spider-Man was nevertheless eventually raised, and rehearsals started up again.

Not Your Mama’s Fairytales or: In Real Life Everything Sucks

Last week, I went to the TRUF at the Chain Theater in Long Island City to see a series of three, one-act plays which were all postmodern-ish retellings/adaptations of fairy tales.  At the heart of all three plays were major existential themes: what things drive us to self-destruction?  Is death a form of freedom...from endless wants, trauma, duty, or circumstances beyond our control?  While admirable and relevant, the plays varied greatly in terms of their execution and quality.

Little Red - written by Billy Aronson, directed by Paul Urcioli, choreographed by Stacey Abeles

This play was the first out of the gate and definitely the weakest of the bunch.  It attempts to put a more adult twist on the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood.”  The story follows the trajectory of the fairytale, but the familiar characters are fleshed out in less innocent ways.  For example, Red’s mother is overbearing and harbors murderous fantasies toward her own mother.  The Hunter is turned into Red’s incompetent father.  Red and the Wolf’s encounter in the woods is sexually charged, and both Red and her grandmother desire to be eaten by him.  Red, in the end, is forced to live “happily ever after” despite wanting to die.

The thought that kept occurring to me as I watched Little Red was that the budget was used in all the wrong ways.  Sets were changed through these moving projection screens that seemed to eat up the production costs.  Actors had to mime props like the table, food, flowers, and Red’s basket.  Because of this, the production came across as quite amateur and high school-ish, despite the actors’ valiant efforts to lift it.  The dance at the start to Sam the Sham and the Pharoah’s “Little Red Riding Hood” was unnecessary and not very well executed on the small stage.  Rick Cekovsky, who portrayed the Wolf, had on these terrible ears.  They were quite a shame as he was quite handsome and could have sold the performance well sans ears.  Overall, it seemed like Urcioli had good ambitions but didn’t really consider the realities of the space.  And the production suffered because of that.

Forever Neverland - written by Mike Swift, directed by P. Adam Walsh

I fear my reception of this play was colored by my dismay at the first piece.  Finding Neverland takes place in a carriage on the ferris wheel at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch...though it took me reading the synopsis to fully figure that out.  The carriage lifts off with two Lost Boys named Billy and Gene (ba-dump chink), the Prince, and the Prince’s pet chimpanzee.  They are joined at the last minute by a girl named Mary Martin (Clever?  I’m ambivalent...) who is disguised as a boy.  She has cancer and believes that the King of Neverland will heal her.  However, they only treat little boys in Neverland, so when her gender is discovered, she escapes by jumping into the same Ferris wheel carriage.  All sorts of hijinks and death ensue because of the Prince’s sadistic tendencies and the randomly violent chimpanzee.  Towards the end, the only two characters left are Mary and and Billy.  Their conversation reveals that the King has prevented Neverland’s Lost Boys from growing up by sexually assaulting them.  Their only escape is to “fly away” (i.e. leaping to their deaths).

Forever Neverland, again, had good thematic intentions but wasn’t executed well.  The first two thirds or so had some serious pacing issues and had me looking at my watch several times even though it was only thirty minutes long.  I was very confused for much of the play.  It improved, though, as characters left the set.  The ending was poignant, but it was hard work getting there. 

Swift’s writing needs some work, especially at the beginning, because the premise isn’t immediately clear.  You don’t know who the characters are and why you should even care.  Production elements like the fake blood are unnecessary, especially in a small space.  Part of me wonders if it was imagined far more cinematically in the playwright’s mind.  Structurally, it seems like certain plot points would be difficult for any director to bring to life on a stage, especially one as intimate as the TRUF.

The Weight of Wishing - written by Sarah Gallina, directed by Sharone Halevy

This play made the other two worth sitting through.  The Weight of Wishing tells the story of Daisy, who lives life as it were a fairy tale.  Her world comes crashing down around her as the realities of every day life show her that happy endings may, in fact, only exist in stories.  

The Weight of Wishing sparkled in a way that the other two didn’t.  The dialogue was beautiful and the direction was nuanced.  For once, it didn’t feel like the actors (who were good in all three plays) were trying to make up for deficiencies in staging or production.  Michaela Morton (Daisy) and Nick Masson (Mark) had brilliant on stage chemistry as sister and brother.  Halevy, unlike Urcioli and Walsh, seemed to understand the limits of performing in a black box theatre and made it work.  The only thing I didn't love was the cardboard flower shop.  It just didn't look good.

If anything, I think some of the opening conversation between Daisy and Mark could be made clearer.  Her initial “real-life” state could be better established in that conversation, so that her journey becomes all the more poignant.  This play has the most potential of the three presented, and I hope to see it in another incarnation.  

(press ticket, fourth row center)