Fabrik

photo: Nordland Visual Theatre

It’s only January, but I can be sure that Wakka Wakka's very special, brilliantly realized Fabrik will be on my Best list at the end of the year. As I stumbled out of Urban Stages, choked with emotion and high on the cathartic power of theatre of quality, I wondered how and why this intimate three-actor puppet show had so deeply moved me. The story, of a neighborly Jewish businessman in Norway who is arrested and persecuted by the Nazis, is not essentially new, but the way it is told - in the manner of a musical folk tale, with the devices of childrens’ theatre -is freshly disarming, and the cumulative power of its many small theatrical wonders makes it newly devastating. The seventy minute show, never less than inventive and captivating, tells the story not only with a variety of highly expressive puppets but also on chilling occasion with the actors in masks, a purposeful mix that makes for strong dramatic imagery. Perhaps the power of Fabrik is that it tells a story of us at our brutal worst, with a creativity that us at our joyful, humanity-affirming best. Yes, that is its magic.

Jerry Springer The Opera

photo: Seth Wenig

There are singing and dancing Klansmen, and songs about the joys of pants-pooping or of pole dancing, but the most shocking thing about this obscenity-laden protest-provoking musical take on the trash-tv show is that it’s boring and dated. The first act, which mostly seeks to musicalize an episode of the show, passes by mostly on the promise of its one-joke conceit, but how many laughs can be wrung out of the incongruity of filthy-mouthed trailer trash singing faux-operatically? The answer is about half as many as are tried for. The freakshow passions of the talk show guests - the guy who wants his fiance to indulge his diaper fetish, the chick with a dick who is lovesick for a two-timer, etc: - are treated as lurid pageant as on the tv show and then mined for "meaning". They have their crazy needs and demands but deep down they just want to be loved. That’s about as deep as we get, and since the show eventually puts them all in Hell anyway, it could hardly be said that the characters are written with anything like genuine compassion or dignity. The second act, which imagines God and Satan as the sparring guests in Springer’s afterlife, has always felt pretentious and entirely superfluous: in this concert version it was also interminable, since it demanded so much of Harvey Keitel, miscast and off the mark as Springer. He played him like a milquetoast. The show is a sendup of America as its British writers see it, but it’s not particularly sharp or insightful stuff, and with the television show now long gone from our pop culture radar, the musical now lacks even the illusion of cultural relevancy. I have one good thing to say about the evening and it’s that Max von Essen’s cheerfully sassy turn as transexual Tremont pumped a few minutes of real juice into this sucker. Otherwise, Jerry Springer The Opera hit New York dead on arrival.

The Devil's Disciple

photo: Carol Rosegg

Although it's his only play set in America and it functions atypically as a farcical spoof of the melodramatic conventions of its day, you nonetheless know right from the first scene that you're in the land of Shaw's wit, as newly widowed Mother preaches God-fearing goodness and charity while emotionally neglecting the bastard child in her care. Set during the Revolutionary War, the quick-paced, enormously entertaining comedy (at Irish Rep) takes sure but gentle aim at the notions of good and evil: it's not one of Shaw's more complex plays, and it's a cinch that he writes the "good" people who are the quickest to proclaim love of God or of country as the true bad guys, but it's mostly lively, merry fun, put over by a game cast who - if perhaps sometimes a tad too broad - know how to get the laughs out of the material and how to let us savor the succinct jagged gems sprinkled among Shaw's dialogue. This was easily the most enjoyable time I've had at Irish Rep since Mrs. Warren's Profession: maybe they should do a Shaw every season.

The Devil's Disciple

Left at Intermish
Irish Rep

Sorry for ditching you, Patrick. I hate Shaw.

Apartment 3A

Annie (Marianna McClellan) needs help. She's broken things off with the love of her life after catching him neck deep in some gymnastic cheating, and she's just moved into a slum, trying to outrun her tears. What she gets is a new friend, Donald (Doug Nyman) an aggressively outgoing neighbor who shows up, LIKE AN ANGEL FROM HEAVEN, to help her adjust. This means forcing her to confront everything she's been running from (which is everything: she "cares too much in a world that doesn't give a shit"). First up, her hopelessly smitten coworker, Elliot (a bland Jay Rohloff), who happens to be a Catholic. I'm not sure why that's important, except that Jeff Daniels, who wrote the play, turns the end of the first act into a twenty minute debate between unconvinced, liberal Annie, and inexplicably faithful Elliot. This is complicated by Annie's simultaneous recounting of these events to Donald, a trick of staging that director Owen Smith fails at. The second act, post-coitus, is even worse, as the discussion tries to link back to religion: her double-digit orgasm is a "gift from god." It's not clear why Elliot is suddenly so brazen, nor why Annie is so open with Donald, and aside from a passably comic routine, there's very little revealed about character. Ultimately, that's the problem with Apartment 3A: the door's wide open, but nobody's home.

Fabrik

Photo/Nordland Visual Theatre

At times reminiscent of the best in both Cabaret and Maus, Wakka Wakka's puppet-driven drama, Fabrik, is no less heartbreaking on its miniature scale. The play begins innocently enough, with a lighthearted song from the proud Jewish businessman Moritz Rabinowitz (David Arkema), and an introduction to some of his forty rules for success, and slowly grows darker. The first glimpse of something amiss is when socialite Mrs. Hansen (Gwendolyn Warnock, who plays all the female parts) deliberately snubs him -- in his own suit-making shop -- choosing instead to talk with Moritz's soft-spoken, Beaker-like assistant, Mr. Askeland (Kirjan Waage, who also created the puppets and masks). As things get darker, the troupe grows more creative in their displays, which in turn only heightens the effect of that horror. Only one play -- Cabaret -- has ever made me sob in a theater; Fabrik now has the powerful distinction of being the second.

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