A Christmas Carol

Tiny Tim is a deejay for the town's radio station, Scrooge is a nerdy entrepreneur, Crachett is a woman. This modern-day Christmas Carol musical (currently at the Vortex Theatre) makes systemic revisions to the story, mostly in pursuit of satiric social comment. Although just about everything has been done to disturb the conventions of holiday-time stories (it's even set during a heat wave: one of the show's funniest moments occurs when a character proposes that everyone think of global warming as a new kind of Christmas miracle) the tone of the show is not abrasive or condascending: there's real invention here rather than nose-thumbing. Risky and rule-breaking, with edgy hybrid musical sensibilities that (save for one brassy show-stopping piano number for the Ghost of Christmas Present) have not the faintest whiff of Broadway, the show is "downtown" in the best sense of the word. However, it's stuffed with so many distortions and revisions of the oft-told Dickens tale that it loses narrative focus: we lose the forest for the trees.

Local Story

The plot of Kristen Palmer's Local Story would either be buried deep in some small town's monthly newspaper or found running in The National Enquirer, but either way, it lacks drama and truth. How else to deal with the entropic, meandering plot, a series of disjointed ideas flung across space and time to eventually coalesce in the nameless town and faceless homes of this play? One moment, Betsy (Keira Keeley) is in Colorado; D'lady (Sarah Kate Jackson) is on the road, talking about fate; and Jimmy (Mark David Watson) is calling after his lover to come back, if not for him, then at least to return his car. The next, Betsy's suddenly living with Gloria (Marielle Heller), a solitary figure with a penchant for strays, and Jimmy's shacked up with Bubba (Travis York), a man who hasn't left his house since his heart went idle three years ago. D'lady's the girl who broke his heart (for Jimmy), and Betsy's the girl who stole Jimmy's: oh, and every so often, the sky opens to rain down Betsy's dreams upon her (car keys, for example). If that weren't enough, Bubba's sister, Amory (Havilah Brewster) keeps nudging her husband, Roy (Ben Scaccia) for a baby, so much so that he sees ghosts on the side of the road. Nobody seems to like anybody else, nor to have a clue as to why that's the case, and Palmer's writing keeps getting lost in a moody wistfulness that is too much past tense, and not enough of the present.

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Doris To Darlene

photo: Joan Marcus

First, there's the mid-1960's story that recalls Phil and Ronnie Spector, in which an obsessive pop record producer cribs a Wagner melody to score a "wall of sound" hit for his discovery Darlene; second, there's the story of Wagner writing that melody, while financed and coddled by his most obsessive fan King Ludwig; third, there is the contemporary story of a gay teenager who obsesses over Darlene's song while nursing an attraction to his high school music teacher, a Wagner buff. This ambitious but only occasionally successful new drama, which rotates and mashes-up those three stories spanning over a century, may want to speak to the powerful mysteries of music that language can not summon, but it is anything but mysterious: it spells everything out and doesn't risk anything as chancey as subtext. The playwright (Jordan Harrison) has the characters authorally speaking their thoughts in the third person nearly as often as they simply speak dialogue to each other: that's distancing rather than involving. It takes a long time to get used to the continual juxtapositions of the stories: I suspect that the playwright's aim is to make a kind of verbal music out of the rotation, but the dialogue is not sufficiently heightened to achieve that. For most of the first act we may as well be watching stick figures go round in a revolving door. The second act is better - a couple of the performers (most notably Tom Nelis, as the music teacher) are able to flesh out their characters and register as human beings - and the big moment that the play has been leading to undoubtedly works. But it would work a lot better if the playwright had more trust in the audience.

Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations)

Photo/Richard Termine

Will Eno's an excellent solipsist, and that helps him to be a great monologist, a writer of such specific dialog that he can trick the audience into soul-searching his every word. With Thom Pain, he found a droll enough actor in James Urbaniak that we wanted to drown in his reflexive thoughts and engage with his double-talk; but his new collection of short plays, Oh, The Humanity (and other exclamations) eschews specificity of thought for grasping meditations on mortality, and while Brian Hutchison and Marisa Tomei are able to tone themselves down, for them, it seems reductive. Worse still, the five short plays that make up the show are redundancies of each other, starting with the excellently fresh "Behold The Coach, In a Blazer, Uninsured," and ending with the dismal "Oh, The Humanity," in which the characters dismiss the artifice of the stage as a cruel reflection of life ("And these are chairs. And that's it. And I don't know who I am.") but offer nothing in return.

[Read on] [Also blogged by: David]

Atomic Farmgirl

Teri Hein's memoir about growing up on a farm "accidentally" being irradiated by a nearby atomic plant in the '50s and '60s is a real American tragedy: the unwitting effects of our own ingenuity (and the more sinister implications of our knowledge) on a hearty family of six. This sprawling saga crams in the growing pains of four sisters, the hardships of farm life (especially in sickness), and the guilt of the living, and overreaches only when it taps Native American mythos to force through an unnecessary parallel. The multi-decade sweep of the narrative isn't what sells the show, however, nor the acting, which often seems half-assed (save for a few, like Maria McConville). Instead, it's the rich little details -- Mona sees herself as patriotic because there's a tumor in her head the size of a baseball -- and the homey, era-appropriate anecdotes (about milk-bottle-shaped buildings) that yield the most nutritious scenes. C. Denby Swanson's adaptation is well-intentioned, so even though the Native American apparitions don't do much for the show, the attempt to draw out a parallel theme is clear, and though there's not much drama in one character talking to a ghost, director Brooke Brod milks it for what it's worth. I'm convinced there's an excellent family drama in there, and the production has a lot of value, so I'm still recommending it, but I do hope The Drilling Company continues to work on this play. It'd be a shame for it to only have a half-life.

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The Receptionist

photo: Joan Marcus

We're in what appears to be an ordinary office watching the Mom-faced receptionist (Jayne Houdyshell) direct incoming calls when she's not dispensing no-nonsense love advice to a co-worker or making light chit-chat with the Central Office suit who's dropped by unexpectedly to have a word with her boss. This is the mundane, seemingly benign first half of Adam Bock's tidy one-act which, with one bombshell, reveals itself as a cautionary modern-day allegory. (Think of the reveal in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, and you'll get a rough idea of the impact, and the gravity, of Bock's sucker-punch.) It could be said that the play is built around a single gimmick - for that reason there will certainly be some theatregoers who will say the play is "slight" - but I wouldn't agree. Do you know that adage that says that the first act of a play is the performance, and the second act is what happens when the audience digests it afterwards? I suspect that this second act will be repeating on me for a long time.