The/King/Operetta

I hope some of you readers are high-school students and/or veterans. Not only would I like to get so diverse a readership, but Waterwell's new half-history/half-vaudeville revue (in a chamber-rock style) is free for you guys. Not that The Last Year In The Life of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As Devised By Waterwell A Rock Operetta isn't worth seeing otherwise, but given the shaky amalgamation of technique that I saw at this preview, it would certainly go down smoother on the cheap. I've had great admiration for Waterwell ever since their last show, Marco Million$ made Eugene O'Neill interesting again. And The/King/Operetta is filled with great music and an award-deserving King (Rodney Gardiner); it's just also filled with a few moments of poor acoustics, an odd vocal choice (or perhaps just an illness) for Kevin Townley's portrayal of the cruelly effeminate Hoover, and some awkward interpretive dance. At the same time, King's final year has never seemed so accessible nor as human as when it's presented as a populist opera that pulls upon rock, ragtime, satirical minstrel work (ala Bamboozled), and even sweet little lullabies to get out the story. The show runs through August 11th, so perhaps give them another week to gel their work, but then by all means run to Barrow Street Theater and check 'em out.

Politics of Passion: Plays of Anthony Minghella

photo: Stan Barouh

Three one-acts, all written by Anthony Minghella (whose film-directing credits include The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), comprise the 100 minute Politics of Passion, currently presented by Potamac Theatre Project as part of their first season back in New York. While the tone of the middle piece (a very brief and out of context scene from the film Truly Madly Deeply) doesn't sit well in the show, the longer one-acts that flank it are very good indeed. The evening's opener is Hang Up, a sharp little observation of two lovers whose late-night phone conversation turns from seemingly benign and agreeable to thorny and distrustful: it's directed and performed at just the right pitch to inspire snickers of knowing recognition from the audience. The main attraction is the show's final play, Cigarettes And Chocolate, in which a woman puzzles her friends by ceasing to speak; her continued silence prompts them to reveal far more to her than they would if she would talk with them. The pace could stand to be a bit quicker, but it's a nifty, cleverly written one-act that gives each of the actors a chance to shine. As the woman who chooses to be mute, Cassidy Freeman remarkably creates a full, ever present character almost entirely out of just sitting and listening, and as her husband, James Matthew Ryan is especially vivid conveying shame, frustration, and flashes of anger.

Politics of Passion: Plays of Anthony Minghella

Photo/Stan Barouh

Anthony Minghella, somewhat of a cold and intellectual director, is also a playwright -- the mind behind Truly, Madly, Deeply, among other movies you might never have seen. He's the same as a playwright: harshly reliant on language and even more so on silence. As a result, Cheryl Faraone's staging seems overdirected at every turn and a real hodgepodge of one-acts. "Hang Up" does well to divide the two actors, MacLeod Andrews and Lauren Turner Kiel, but the choice to have Kiel sitting on a ladder adds nothing to what is already turning into a terse conversation between He and She. A short excerpt from "Truly, Madly, Deeply," is filled with overflowing energy as a man tries to prolong what would otherwise be the shortest date ever with his art therapy insanity, but its brevity makes it seem like a scene being workshopped in class. The anchor of the night, the 70 minute one-act, "Cigarettes and Chocolate" begins too much in the misty vignette style of Jim Jarmusch, and by the time it settles and shows off Minghella's strengths as a storyteller (in monologue form), Faraone has already lost us with her pastel backgrounds and slanted lighting, all of which serve to make the play seem far more pretentious (or portentous) than it actually is.

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No End of Blame

Photo/Stan Barouh
Art/Gerald Scarfe

"Art don't hurt, but cartoons do," says Bela Veracek, the stubborn and brilliant political cartoonist who is the center of Howard Barker's excellent No End Of Blame. "I shock the bastards into life." The Potomac Theatre Project is wonderfully versed in the dark satire needed to revive such an epic play, and while it isn't shocking so much as provocative, it's filled with life. The strong ensemble of thirteen has a great range that lets them span sixty of the fictional Veracek's embattled years, not to mention the intricacies of the language, which puts the politeness of words to the test and views the world as the "Castor oil of life." Much recommended, especially for political theater buffs.

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Doppelganger

Theater is about moments like the one represented in this picture. Unfortunately, this singular snapshot is one of the few things Doppelganger gets right: the rest of Emanuel Bocchieri's direction uses a new technology developed by Feed the Herd at 3LD to randomize cues based on human interaction. In other words: every show has the potential for gripping imagery, or just a lot of dead time on stage and awkward interactions between actors (none of whom are that good in this production). Simon Heath has good set pieces--a sleep lab, a cluttered apartment--and some tangible, albeit science-laden, ideas, but none of it comes together so much as in the one picture above. The rest of the show is this moment's double, its doppelganger, and the play is as far from transcendent as it gets.

Doppelganger

photo: Ian Tabatchnick

Doppelganger, developed at 3LD through their Curated Residency Program, features a wealth of multimedia events, some of which are motion-activated by the actors and therefore left to chance. This idea seems to promise a risky, anything-can-happen playing ground (appropriate for a story that gets started following a freak accident) but the night I saw it, the multimedia mostly seemed as stiff as a Power Point presentation. Perhaps that's intended, in service of one of the play's subthemes of the inhumanity of corporate culture, but the result is that too much of the play is distant and inhuman; it's telling that the moments when the play most held the attention were ones that involved the least technological business.