fuckplays

****1/2

Working Man's Clothes Productions

Never underestimate the power of a good title. I was curtly chided for showing up a few minutes after 7:30 to collect my ticket and was put on stand-by status as the house was completely sold out. Happily, there was one seat left for me and happily this collection of 8 lusty short plays by 8 lusty playwrights was as slutty and fun as its title. Ranging from naughty to downright crass, every one of these plays was actually very well written and very well performed. My favorite was "The Impotence Of Being Ernest" which featured the stiff (in more ways than one) husband of Gwendolyn (from the Wilde play it spoofs) recounting to his best friend a failed attempt at "coital relations" with his new wife. Such frank language over a spot of tea indeed! And the final play's dialogue was so hysterically raunchy ("...she shit in my mouth!... about two shot glasses full") that I would like to ask the playwright's hand in marriage. The "lights up!"/crew exposed/"cue the bed!" cacophony in between the scenes made us feel like we were on the set of a porn shoot. Great idea!

Face The Music

photo: Joan Marcus

I was delighted by the opening number, a witty ditty that depicts the Astor and Rockefeller-type Manhattan bluebloods so pinched by the Depression that they've taken to dining and schmoozing at the Automat. By the second number, a dynamite little "forget your troubles" tapdance that showcased wonderful Jeffry Denman and Meredith Patterson all but gliding on air, I was almost giddy with pleasure. I fell positively and officially in love with this show by the third number, a mock-patriotic spoof that promotes thrift in tough times (Why give three cheers when two will do?/Let's cheer the red and the white but not the blue!) Where in the world has this spiffy, clever, tuneful little Irving Berlin backstage musical been hiding? And how has Encores! managed to do it so wonderfully right, from the flawless casting to the spare but stylishly evocative sets to the pulse-quickening orchestrations? Judy Kaye, Walter Bobbie, Mylinda Hull, Eddie Korbich, Felicia Finley, and so on: there isn't a bum performance in the bunch, and every performer is on the same page of era-specificity and accuracy. If the stated mission of Encores! - to mount concert productions of little-known musicals which respect the material - is the kind of thing you like, then Face The Music is the kind of thing you will love. The time machine has coughed up a diamond.

The Secret Agenda of Trees

Struggling semi-white-trash single-mom families are nothing new to the theatrical canon, nor should they be: they make for great drama. Drunk one-night stands with strange, domineering men that turn into lengthy, tainted-love relationships: those are no surprise neither. But The Secret Agenda of Trees handles the two with such a succulent grasp of language that Colin McKenna's play rises above its stereotypes and major dramatic cliches (like a drug overdose and rather restrained recovery). It also has one final trick up its sleeve: a gifted daughter who styles herself after Rosemary Clooney and lives in a fantasy world, but who also nurses her own addiction to a wannabe Salvatorian-gangbanger named Carlos (Gio Perez is, unfortunately, the one character in the play who doesn't surpass the stereotype). That's original, or at least Sarah Lord's brilliant portrayal of her is, flushed as it is between monologuing dream narratives and fearless real-world experiments. Make no mistake, Veronica is the heart of this piece, and she pumps with such ferocious strength that there's more than enough blood to circulate even through the limper, less defined vessels of the show.

Doublethink

***1/2


PS122 (where else?)

After severely disliking last year's An Oak Tree, I was leery about this production of Doublethink which, like ...Tree, features performers who walk into Act 1, Scene 1 completely unknowing of what the hell's gonna happen over the course of the show. In ...Tree it was a long list of orders: "Okay, stand here now". "Say this". "Now look over there". etc. It got very tedious and I could sense the actor's frustration with being micromanaged. Doublethink generally begins with the same concept (though here there are two actors who cannot see each other who are performing the same tasks). It is when another layer of reality (which I shouldn't give away here) is added that this performance art experiment really pops and becomes this trippy, fascinating, avant garde study in human behavior. These actors, like in ...Tree , still have those "what on earth have I gotten myself into?" looks on their faces but that's exactly what the creators of Doublethink were hoping for.
Also blogged by: [Aaron]

Doublethink

Attention: you've got the rest of this weekend, and this weekend only, to catch Doublethink, by Rotozaza, at PS122, before this marvelously human exhibition vanishes from the stage. This double-blind experiment in trust, communication, and committment is absolutely thrilling, and even after the whole thing becomes a wonky avant-garde display, our two surrogate guest performers (on my night, Steve Cuiffo and Theo Kogan), are too innocent to make us feel as if we've been used or toyed with in any way. For all the instructions they're fed in private (or publically, for the first thirty minutes), they're still ultimately as much in the dark as us, and it's a thrilling Space Mountain-like ride for those of us willing to follow down the rabbit hole. And but so then plus, my personal commendation to Neil Bennun and Silvia Mercuriali for so smoothly operating that ride; I couldn't ask for better Mad Hatters and White Hares.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: David]

Sweet Love Adieu

Lion Theatre
Left at intermish.

note to self: your ADD makes you tune out Elizabethan verse.