Aaron's End of Year Wrap-Up

Go ahead. Tell me what I missed. (I know, I know, August.)

Patrick's Year-End Review

1 The Year's Fifteen Best
2 Twenty-Five Outstanding Performances
3 Twelve Fresh Faces

David's BEST/WORST of 2007!!

CLICK HERE!

Runt Of The Litter

photo: Joan Marcus

Bo Eason's career, as defensive back for the Oilers, was overshadowed by his brother Tony's more celebrated success as starting quarterback for the Patriots. Bo's solo show (now at 37 Arts following a successful run downtown a few years ago) changes their names and adds some fictional events, but it seems essentially to be a monologue written from the blood and sweat of his real-life struggles in his brother's shadow. The play's greatest strength is its inside-the-helmet view of the experience of playing pro football: the most fascinating segment has Eason suiting up for a game and changing before our eyes from a doggedly determined but physically improbable pro hopeful to a steel-edged NFL gladiator. He becames grandiose, elevating football to a mythic level and taking pleasure in the uniform's implicit permission to let him play out naked animal aggression. In other words, it's a sensationally honest moment. Eason is the narrator of this story more than he is an actor, and he's been directed to do a lot of business to sell it on stage. Once in a while that proves to be overly indicating, because his writing is strong enough and he's an inviting and confident enough personality to do the job with less.

New Jerusalem

I'm such a fan of David Ives that I rushed out to see the very first preview of his new play, New Jerusalem, and although there was some of that increasingly common line flubbing, I'm happy to report that this is a great new comic drama. Ives is a master of writing other people, and what he did for Twain's farce (or for the adaptations for the Encores! series) he's now doing for a great philosopher, Spinoza, communicating his thoughts with such clear strokes that it makes you want to rush out and buy a treatise or two. The play would be stronger to cut down on the gratingly comic half-sister, Rebekah (Jenn Harris) and the bland, shiftless friend cum traitor Simon (Michael Izquierdo), as their "revelations" at the end of the play aren't earned or justified, but it hardly matters so long as Jeremy Strong remains so breathlessly animated as Spinoza. The "interrogation" is casually directed by Walter Bobbie so as to make the audience the actual onlookers, and while this leads to some sloppy blocking, it actually works to help make the overacting seem more plausible -- this is, after all, one of the first trials that's a real circus, and it makes the proselytizing all the more engaging when it's spoken directly to you. Beneath the radical ideas about religion, faith, and humanity's place in the universe, there's also a neatly tragic tale of the father-figure forced to turn on his "son," and Richard Easton, who warms up to the role in the second act, is appropriately pained when he sadly announces "You've turned the stars into wandering dust." This show will get better by the time it actually opens in '08, and I urge you to check it out: Fyvush Finkel and David Garrison both also give solid, albeit stereotypical, performances as (respectively) a Jewish parnas and a Christian politician.

Cymbeline

Photo/Paul Kolnik

Ever wonder what a Shakespearean opera would look like? Well, Marc Lamos's cavernous production of Cymbeline has the visual feel of a modernist composition, all green-columned trees and ornate, clockwork landings, and it's tonally minimal at all, with very few actors rising above the general feeling of deja vu this play evokes (Iacomo could be Iago, Imogen's empotioned "death" could just as well be a more mature Juliet's). Short of the play's own failings -- the first act, for instance, is filled with familiar innuendos and comic twists whereas the second is all epic sword fights and visitations from spirits like Jupiter -- only Martha Plimpton, as Imogen, seems to be in complete control, channeling a little of playful Helena from Midsummer and a little of her tragic turn in Coast of Utopia, though she's well met by a very funny Adam Dannheisser as the incompetent Lord Cloten. However, much of the play feels like a waste of talent: Phylicia Rashad is talked about more than seen (as the Queen), and Richard Topol and Daniel Breaker, who introduce the play rather nicely, do little else.

[Also blogged by: Patrick]