Hysteria

Photo: Joseph Alford

In a 1915 poem by TS Eliot called "Hysteria," the anxious narrator becomes disturbed by his date's raucous laughter. The show Hysteria, created and performed by the group Inspector Sands (Lucinka Eisler, Giulia Innocenti, and Ben Lewis), is a riff on Eliot's work. That it is an absurdist riff is made clear from the beginning, when the gender-ambiguous, obsessive-compulsive, paranoid wait-person, while preparing for work, discovers that one of his or her teeth has migrated to the back of his or her neck. The people on the date are a nervous young man who periodically breaks away from the date to lecture the audience about his research and an equally nervous young woman who keeps a red boa and a couple of bananas in her purse. There's little plot to speak of; instead, the show consists of moments that sometimes lay bare the differences between our inner and outer beings and sometimes are there because they are funny, because the physical humor meshes perfectly with the talented cast's abilities, or, well, just because. Hysteria's 55 minutes go quickly, and it is frequently entertaining. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you enjoy graceful physical humor and absurdist theatre, you'll find a lot here to like.

No Exit

Photo: David Epstein

My knowledge of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit was limited to the line, "Hell is other people," so I grabbed the opportunity to see the Invisible City Theater Company's production of John Bowles's translation of Sartre's existentialist classic. Because their production of Arcadia years ago was excellent, I was optimistic about Invisible City's No Exit and I was mostly not disappointed. Granted, the production is not perfect. Cecelia Frontero doesn't nail the role of Inez, and her odd-fitting pants distract from her performance. There is little by the way of production values, and some of the light cues are arbitrary and annoying. But, on a whole, the cast and director David Epstein provide a vivid, emotional, hard-hitting production of Sartre's still timely play. The storyline is simple: three people are locked together in a room in hell for eternity, and they discover little by little that they are one another's punishment. Cradeau (Alex Cape) is a hard-hearted coward; Estelle (Jenna Doolittle) is an adulterous blonde who has murdered her own child; and Inez is a cruel lesbian who pushed her cousin aside to be with his wife, eventually leading to her cousin's death (interestingly, the play doesn't point to her lesbianism as the source of her evil, but rather to her behavior, an advanced point of view in 1944). The three jostle for power and allegiances and maybe redemption, all the while knowing that they are damned in the most horrible, permanent sense of the word. Invisible City's production is funny, unsettling, and satisfyingly claustrophobic.

Hapgood

Tom Stoppard is a brilliant playwright, but sometimes he can't tell the difference between a play and a lecture. Hapgood's ratio of physics versus theatre is unfortunately skewed toward the former, and while Stoppard's conceit of having the plot reflect the physics is strong, its execution is confusing. Hapgood is an iconoclastic spy for England. She uses the dedicated phone line to the prime minister to talk with her son; she has sex with other agents (English and otherwise); and she does what she wants when she wants. In Hapgood she is faced with a dilemma. A double (or is it triple, or is it quadruple?) agent has given secret information to the Russians. Has Kerner, the physicist and Russian agent turned English agent (and father of her son), been turned again? What has Ridley been up to? What about the twin Russian agents? And, also, will Hapgood find true love and settle down? Stoppard draws smart and interesting parallels between the behavior of light waves/particles and the behavior of secret agents, but the play ultimately comes across as dry, with too much stuff going on--too many twists and turns, too much physics, too many lectures--and not enough humanity. The Phoenix Ensemble does a valiant job presenting this challenging play, and succeeds intermittently. Joe Menino as Kerner is charming and presents scientific ideas clearly while sounding like an actual person. Jason O'Connell and Craig Smith also bring much to the production. Elise Stone, in the pivotal role of Hapgood, gives a surface-level performance, with little variety to line readings (speaking fast does not a character make) and too much "matter-of-fact-ness" to be real. As the other Hapgood, she denotes quirkiness by fluffing her hair, and fluffing her hair, and fluffing her hair. The direction by John Giampietro is good but he doesn't succeed in bringing a maximum level of clarity to the goings-on.

Haunted

Photo: Jonathan Keenan

Sometimes ambiguity adds suspense and atmosphere to a production. Sometimes it is just confusing. At the beginning of Edna O'Brien's Haunted, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59e59, two women are barely visible behind a translucent wall. As an old man implores, "Stay, stay," the lighting changes and the women vanish. Add this opening to the title Haunted, and it is reasonable to expect a ghost story. However, the production never clarifies whether we are seeing ghosts, flashbacks, or a dramatization of the old man's probably unreliable memories. Rather than adding to the play's impact, this ambiguity diffuses it, pulling focus from the story at hand, which is somewhat interesting: the old man starts a platonic relationship with a young woman, allowing her to believe that his wife is dead. His wife, already unhappy with his sexual coldness and his past adultery, becomes suspicious and eventually incensed. But the relationships aren't quite convincing. For example, although the young woman is lonely, and the old man flatters her, it is still difficult to believe she would befriend him, as his urbanity and almost charm provide only a fragile veneer over his pathetic lechery. As played by Brenda Blethyn and Niall Buggy, the husband and wife come across as more compelling than the writing might warrant, though Beth Cooke fares less well as the young woman. The play's main strength is its use of language, which is often beautiful and frequently quotes great writers, particularly Shakespeare.

Short Takes

Nyack High School presented an excellent production of The Laramie Project for two performances this month. The pacing could have been quicker, but many of the performances were top-notch, and my devastation by the end was testimony to the quality of the work. I salute Nyack High and director Joe Egan for their ambition and for the consistently high level of their productions. (Full disclosure: my niece was the production stage manager and my nephew performed.)

I don't know why the folks at Encores! felt a need to produce Bells Are Ringing, since the show had a Broadway revival less than ten years ago. But I'm glad they did, since their production was head-and-shoulders above that revival, being a delight from start to finish. Bells Are Ringing is not a masterpiece. In fact, it is deeply silly. But it is vintage, brilliant silliness, courtesy of Comden and Green and Jule Styne, with such wonderful songs as "The Party's Over" and "Just in Time." Kelli O'Hara may have lacked a level of zaniness, but she was lovely, and Will Chase did nicely as the leading man. Katherine Marshall's choreography and the wonderful dancers brought energy and excitement to the stage, and David Pittu and Judy Kaye provided first-class support. It was a treat to see the charming Encores! stalwart J.D. Webster do a solo turn.

I saw Stephen Sondheim interviewed twice in a week--once by Frank Rich (part of the Times Talk series) and once by Tony Kushner (part of the Public Forum). The Rich interview covered familiar ground, but Rich's questions were smart and insightful. The Kushner interview went hither and yon, to the great delight of the audience. Sondheim, in addition to his other talents, is a great raconteur and a fair mimic. His stories in the interviews included an imitation of Elaine Stritch calling for her lines when she had a prompter in A Little Night Music ("in the villa of the Baron . . . MARY!"); a riff on how Ethel Merman might have "danced" in the finale to Gypsy if Jerome Robbins had stuck to his original plan to end the show with a summation ballet; a tale of being (literally!) hissed in England because he had criticized Noel Coward's and W.S. Gilbert's lyric writing; and a paean to the joys of collaboration and rewriting. With Rich, Sondheim was laid-back and comfortable, and their friendship was evident. With Kushner, he was more playful and bantering, even a little competitive in a friendly way. Both evenings were wonderful, but I wish I could have joined them for drinks or dinner afterward and heard the stories Sondheim doesn't tell in public.

A Free Man of Color

photo: T. Charles Erickson

No one can fault John Guare for being ambitious. His play A Free Man of Color, which has been in gestation for over twenty years, represents not only two decades of work, but a sweeping amalgamation of 200 years of Euro-American history. In doing so, however--and especially in choosing to use restoration comedy as his framing device--Guare has offered his audience moments of beautiful clarity buried within an everest of pomp and circumstance. The main action is centered around the life of Jacques Cornet (Jeffrey Wright, brilliant as usual), the titular emancipated mulatto; unfortunately, the playwright seems unclear as to how the other aspects of the drama--which includes Thomas Jefferson and Touissant L'Ouverture, Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte, and the melding of racial impropriety--fit into Cornet's journey towards self-discovery and a realization of the changing times. Wright gives a mammoth, herculean performance (I spent much of the performance imagining which Shakespearean heroes I'd love to see him play), and the supporting cast (featuring Mos Def, John McMartin, Paul Dano, and the wonderful newcomer Nicole Beharie) do uniformly fine work. Unfortunately, though, there is nothing that can be done to make Guare's divergent strands of plot coalesce. Like the world of opulence it portrays, the play is alluring but ultimately hollow.

(Seen at the matinee on November 26. TDF tickets; Orchestra Row F)