FringeNYC 2004 Reviews - Page 14

You've Never Done Anything Unforgivable
reviewed by Debbie Hoodiman

In You’ve Never Done Anything Unforgivable, Matthew Humphreys performs three short stories written by George Saunders, adapted by Humphreys and Brendan Hughes for the stage.

The three stories, from Saunders’ collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, are “Isabelle,” “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz,” and “The 400-Pound CEO.” With recurring themes of guilt, revenge, violence, and vulnerability, the stories take place in a satirical version of America where, for example, in “Offloading…,” customers can visit a booth in the mall and pay $70 for an hour-long virtual reality experience of their choice, and in “The 400-Pound CEO,” guilty people hire a raccoon disposal service which has a dirty secret. The first story, “Isabelle,” is about a man who witnesses a violent act and the violent revenge that ensues.

The set, designed by Sandra Goldmark, consists of a platform which is rotated and flipped to create three distinct playing spaces. Particularly interesting is the third setting, where the wall is a tile floor from which a chair, trash pail, and trash hang suspended. I don’t want to give anything away, but the set allows for a beautiful final picture at the end of the show.

As a performer, Humphreys creates distinct characters and keeps the audience intrigued as the stories unfold—not an easy task given their length and detail. In the third story, he successfully creates the illusion of a different body type through specific, simple choices. Under Hughes’ direction, he acts out scenes when appropriate, while other times, as in “Isabelle,” Humphreys just sits still and describes. Jessica Ford’s costumes are also particularly effective, helping create the distinct characters and settings.

The most compelling element of the piece, however—and given the caliber of the stories, it would be impossible for it not to be—is the material itself. Saunders’ stories are richly detailed, funny, suspenseful, relevant, bizarre, and interesting. What a delight to sit in a theater and watch them unfold as executed in this piece!

Pith!
reviewed by Gregg Bellon

In Pith!, written and directed by Stewart Lemoine, Jack Vail (the boundless Jeff Haslam), a seafaring wanderer, narrates a lyrical yarn about his decision to settle briefly in Providence, Rhode Island in 1931, and his providential encounter at a Presbyterian church service with the mournful Virginia Tilford (Davina Stewart) and her companion Nancy Kimble (Leona Brausen). In the Prologue, Jack sets up the period, mood, pace, and convention of Lemoine’s plot and purpose, mostly through a perfectly nuanced monologue but also in a wonderfully simple scene with Ms. Kimble in which the two characters get the ball rolling with some dexterous verbal banter. It seems that Mr. Tilford, heir to a Silverware fortune, went missing ten years past on an expedition to find silver in the rainforest of Ecuador, and Virginia  now wallows in seclusion listening exclusively to Rosa Ponselle opera recordings. Jack, with his gift for imaginings, promises Ms. Kimble that he can rid Mrs. Tilford of her forlorn grief and invites himself over the next afternoon to prove it.

While it’s all got a clean good-hearted feel to it, there’s an element of the snake oil salesman in Jack and of the rube in Ms. Kimble. But when the fun gets going in the Tilford mansion, even Mrs. Tilford’s decade of grief is easily washed away with a forced attempt at slapstick. Jack barges in impersonating a government adjuster of furniture and Ms. Kimble tries her best to keep up with the nonsense and stay out of his tempest. Just when you think Mrs. Tilford would be ready to go “send in the hounds!” on Jack, she not only gets on the train, but she conducts. The wild concoctions they brew up involve a transcontinental, trans-Caribbean adventure on trains, ships, and canoes to the jungles of Ecuador, retracing Tilford’s own journey and resolving Virginia’s acceptance of his death. All accomplished without ever leaving the sitting room of the Tilford mansion, very clean, smooth, even providential in its ease. It all comes too easily: for Jack in convincing both Kimble and Tilford; for Virginia in accepting this stranger and letting go of ten years' worth of unresolved grief; and for Lemoine in resolving every plot point neatly, even Jack’s karma.

I’d hate to think that I’m too hardened to appreciate a night of wispy light fare. But I can’t deny that I have a low threshold for sweets. Pith! provides more than enough sweet goodness, but offers little in the way of substance or, well, pith. However, if the rest of Teatro la Quindicina (the Edmonton, Canada company that is presenting this show at FringeNYC) is as professional as the crew here, they’re headed in the right direction.

Suicide/Joke
reviewed by Hieu Tran

Jonathan Karpinos, the author of Suicide/Joke, calls his play an “unnerving comedy.” To a great extent that's true, but I would also like to add that it is enormously engaging, equally compelling, and more dramatic than comedic—though there are plenty of laughs, well-earned, throughout the show.

Under the expert, lively direction of David Chapman, who gets each actor to speak in a naturalistic locution that is distinctly the playwright’s own, we are introduced to the world of Amanda (played with jaw-dropping accuracy by Megan Ketch), a fifteen-year-old girl who defies convenient description. She is the product of a broken family: her father, Chris (Sean Williams), is a Vietnam War vet who sometimes spaces out in the middle of conversations and seems to be making up the rules of parenting as they become necessary. He takes his daughter to a bar one night, partly to defy the contemptuous expectation of her mother (Emily Shoolin)  that a weekend with dad is always a weekend of pizza, movies, and homework. At the bar the two meet up with Chris’s old friend and fellow veteran, Larry (Matthew Kinney), a pool shark who hustles people out of their money on a nightly basis. Amanda is offered glasses of White Russians and chances to see Larry get into a fight with one of the men he’s hustled. Her response to all this? Inexplicable. Her reaction is a constellation of minute, interactive responses and emotions: one-part awe, one-part acceptance; concern, caution, indecisiveness.

It was at this moment that I realized that Suicide/Joke was not going to be a cookie-cutter melodrama; nor was it to be a painfully chic absurd comedy. The play is too perceptive of, and honest toward, its characters to fall into the trappings of either genre.

Even the short-lived, casual encounters between Amanda and Josh (played with affecting insouciance by John McGrew, who also composed the ethereal but contemporary music for the play) offer more dramatic resonance in their combined twenty minutes of stage-time than half a dozen other more carefully “thought-out” and long-winded relationships you might see on TV or in the movies. The two meet at a party a week after Amanda’s trip to the bar, and Josh doesn’t so much hit on her as just start up a conversation. What happens thereafter, and Amanda and Josh’s response to it a few days later, strike at an unnerving truth with which many teenagers can identify—and which most of their parents would try hard to deny.

Question Love
reviewed by Fred Backus

What was your first sexual experience? What was your worst break-up? What are your feelings on marriage? The answers to these and other questions, posed to more than fifty urban women by director Hayley Finn, interspersed with live original music by Kat Goldman, form the theatrical collage Question Love. Taking on the voices of these women, performers Kathleen Early, Sharahn LaRue, and Susan O’Connor create a portrait of the modern woman trying to negotiate the perils and pitfalls of dating, looking for a balance between the values and goals inherited from past generations and the pressures and aspirations of the present.

This is not exactly new ground, but an innovative approach might justify taking these interviews off the tape or the transcript and placing them on the stage. Sadly, the staging and design elements here seem tacked-on and arbitrary. Goldman is a talented musician and songwriter with a beautifully textured voice, but her musical numbers do little more than set a wistful mood, and don’t seem to justify the prominent place they hold in this piece. The projection screen, used mostly to flash questions and names, is used in particularly trite and unimaginative ways. At one point a woman describes a romantic partnership as one in which two circles come together and form the infinity symbol; we then watch two circles meet on the screen—do we really need help visualizing this? But certainly the most dismally uninspired moment has to be when the cast and audience together watch an actual scene from When Harry Met Sally.

And if Finn’s research shows that a large number of women are indeed citing When Harry Met Sally as a seminal movie on the modern relationship, perhaps one of these women could be asked why they feel this is so. But the questions don’t seem to lead the women interviewed to draw many conclusions from their anecdotes, nor does Question Love seem to be interested in piecing these testimonials together into a work that poses new questions itself. That Question Love remains engaging is a huge credit to its trio of actors, who do a wonderful job across the board of inhabiting and delineating its many voices without succumbing to the temptation to over-dramatize them or send them up. Question Love is a work-in-progress, and will presumably appear again with new interviews in different forms. If so, I personally would love to see it attempt to be more truly challenging and thought provoking, rather than simply cathartic and sentimental.

Plays for the Poor Theatre
reviewed by Brian Rogers

There is a remarkable bit of stagecraft in the second hour of Plays for the Poor Theatre, cellarDoor's revival of two1960s Howard Brenton shorts. Involving a grotesque life-size puppet made of steel wire, it's the best kind of theatrical invention: simple and (genuinely) surprising.

The plays seen here—Gum and Goo, a prolonged nightmare seen through the eyes of an autistic girl; and Christie in Love, an investigation into the sexual proclivities of the notorious London serial killer John Reginald Christie—make Brenton's influence on a younger generation of British playwrights (most notably Sarah Kane) amply clear. They're knotty, imagistic, rough, brutal, poetic, and difficult to watch (that's a compliment).

The infamous steel wire puppet makes its appearance in Christie in Love, and transforms what could have been a sort of garden variety psychosexual crash course (so many serial killers on stage these days) into something far more unsettling. Director Lydia Steier—an American living in Berlin—meticulously strips away the play's human face, and in its place gives us a sort of terrifying blank slate. We stare into the abyss and what we see is: us. The worst side of us.

This moment far outpaces anything else on display in this two-hour exercise. Though performed with great skill (and an unnerving level of physical commitment) by a cast of four (in particular, Simon Newby as John Reginald Christie is uncomfortably successful), Steier's productions offer little in the way of visual ingenuity or revealing choreography. It's a long, messy affair, which though arguably appropriate to Brenton, is needlessly repetitious and frustratingly slow. It's clear that Steier's got something interesting up her sleeve. But she chooses, here, to keep it mostly to herself; prompting me, as I exited the theater, to ask: "what could have been?"

The Life and Times of a Wonder Woman
reviewed by Robin Reed

Now I might be just slightly too young to remember the exact details of the television series Wonder Woman, but that doesn’t stop that little tingle in my belly when I think about it. Frankly, what gets me excited is what gets most Generation X-ers (are we still using that term?) charged on this seemingly endless surge of retro kitsch we call now: these jump-cut flashbacks to our not so distant youth. In my mind, Wonder Woman conjures up a young me, in my Underoos, running around the neighborhood and rounding up evil-doers with my lasso of truth, lies ricocheting off of my super-powered bracelets, riding off into the victorious sunset in my invisible jet.

Skullduggery’s The Life and Times of a Wonder Woman filled me with that same giddy excitement, and although I left slightly enlightened I also left a smidge embarrassed. If she knew then what I know now, my mom probably would not have let me stay up past my bedtime to watch Lynda Carter spinning into a crime-avenging frenzy.

This piece could have been subtitled “A Ride Inside her Little Black Book” as we become privy to who, between Batman and Superman, is a better lay; stories of lesbian trysts with Helen of Troy; and a funny little rant about lingerie.

That’s right, kids, when she’s not conquering villains, Wonder Woman is a naughty, naughty lassie. Terry Newman’s exploration of the ass-kicking Amazonian Princess takes us inside her boudoir and shows that there is more to her than just being a super hero. She’s the one who the boys want to bed and the girls want to be. The play boldly takes the comic book/TV heroine far beyond the everyday retro-rama that makes hipsters want to buy lunchboxes.

Tara Hendry is just excellent as Wonder Woman. She not only looks the part (with a stellar Lynda Carter meets Catherine Zeta-Jones beauty) but plays to the audience with as much grace and charm as can be expected from a gal spinning around on stage in spar-spangled knickers. She’s got the kicks, the spins, and the bullets-reflecting-off-the-bracelets down pat. All is accentuated with a simple strobe light to give it that slightly cheesy 70s chase scene feel.

This show was a hit in Edinburgh and I can see why. Welcome to New York, Skullduggery. I hope we get to see a lot more from these folks in the future!

Moonchild
reviewed by Neal Utterback

Moonchild, by Maureen Fitzgerald, centers around a fictionalized meeting of L. Ron Hubbard and the eccentric rocket scientist turned Satanist, Jack Parsons. Mix in two parts grift, one part Aleister Crowley and a dash of lunacy and you have the makings of a wonderful comic adventure. However, much of this production fails to fully live up to the text's promise.

Parsons, played by the handsome Eric Altheide, is hell-bent on conceiving the spawn of Satan, or Moonchild. The child will bring about chaos, the end of civilization, yadda yadda yadda. Seeing dollar signs, Hubbard (Jonathan Cantor) finagles his way into a lucrative agreement with Parsons and his wife’s sister (and lover), the befuddled Betty Northrop (Abby Wathen). Hubbard, who recites self-actualizing mantras written on cue cards, enlists the help of fellow con Marjorie Cameron (Heather Tom). Cameron is to be the Mother-Queen of the demon child. Determined to foil their attempts, Betty and Parsons' best friend Billy Crewson (Andrew Shulman) call cult master Aleister Crowley (played wonderfully by David Jones).

Parsons' sex cult offers the perfect backdrop for this play, billed as a farce, which has characters jumping into bed with one another, double crossing con artists, and enough wit to cloak the production’s shortcomings. Playwright Fitzgerald has enriched the text with fun, energetic dialogue that has the flavor of a World War II-era America and yet remains topical and accessible. She deconstructs Hubbard’s ideologies as a comment on the corruption of the American Dream and yet manages to maintain him as a kind of anti-hero.

Unfortunately, in reaching for a farcical acting style, I fear that the production only manages to be dishonest and forced. It was often unclear if the actors were specifically directed to give “takes” to the audience or if they were looking for their aunt. For my money, it is always better, comedy or drama, to have actors commit to honest actions born out of high-stakes situations. That being the standard, the more desperate the actions, the funnier the character will seem to the audience. Unfortunately, at the performance of Moonchild I saw, there was a lot of winking and nodding from the actors but not a lot of laughing from the audience.

5000 Nights
reviewed by Jonathan Warman

On the surface, 5000 Nights looks like something between a homage to and a parody of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It's about two hobos, one named Demetri (a Slavic name like Beckett’s Vladimir), the other Pelias (an odd, vaguely Romance name like Beckett’s Estragon). The name Pelias also seems like it might be a reference to one of Godot’s ancestors, Pelleas et Melisande by symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Indeed 5000 Nights marries Beckett’s desolate, dry, despairing wit with the mystical materialism of the symbolists.

If this sounds arty, well, yeah, it is. This show isn’t for everybody, some may find it pretentious (to be honest I occasionally found it guilty of the lesser, similar sin of preciousness), and there’s not a lot of plot. Still, there’s something magical about the images that actually appear on director/playwright Kevin Lawler’s stage. A lot of that magic comes from the performances of longtime Lawler associates Hughston Walkinshaw (who plays Demetri as a hoarse “grey eminence”) and Nils Haaland (playing Pelias as jaunty, nasal and eager to please). The two roles are tailor-made for the very talented performers playing them, and that tailoring makes what would in other hands be simply depressing somehow luminous. Especially effective are the uncredited lighting that plays beautiful games with the retina, and Lawler’s staging, which emphasizes the materiality and immediacy of live theater with an almost religious reverence. For all its flaws, 5000 Nights possesses an arresting beauty that could only be described as eminently theatrical.

Vuillard's Room
reviewed by Sharon Fogarty

Choreographer/director J’aime Morrison was luckily available for a moment to mention why she was inspired by Vuillard’s themes. “I come from a family of seamstresses,” she offered; Edouard Vuillard was a Nabis painter (les Nabis—from the French word for prophet—were a Parisian group of post-impressionists-turned-illustrators) who lived surrounded by feminine domesticity, a theme that became the signature of many of his works. Morrison is adept at humorously recreating Vuillard’s "room" in this new dance-theatre piece.

Five outstanding dancer/actors emerge from the living texture of Susan Zeeman Rogers’ eloquently patterned scene design, wearing the impressive early 19th century costumes by Maro Parian. Carine Montbertrand is especially amusing in the role of Mme. Vuillard who, when her English or French text (all from Vuillard’s journal entries) seems to evaporate, is forced to communicate her frustration physically. Tom O’Reilly gives a sweet and humble performance of Vuillard amidst the kinetic weaving and grieving of his feminine counterparts, while Morrison herself is electric as the visiting seamstress who eventually becomes a competitor to Vuillard’s sister, Marie.

In the role of Marie is Aimée Phelan Deconinck, one of the most captivating actress/dancers I have seen in a long time, whose statuesque elegance and technique are only overshadowed by her powerful acting ability. Deconinck appears to act from her spine as she flips between gestures of longing to connect, to those conveying an intense desire to disappear. Marie is depicted as someone too sensitive for this world and yet she is thrust into an encounter with the striking and worldly artist Roussel. Joshua Seidner’s performance in this role is splendid, with likeable arrogance as he carelessly sweeps Marie off her feet, only to become quickly unfaithful to her. Like a crazed dollmaker, Deconinck’s gesture of pulling a needle and thread begins to tug at her solar plexus as if fixing a painful tear in her heart.

Other highlights include a scene in which Roussel’s camera (an ancient silver plate with black pleated housing) is placed upon the headless neck of a dress dummy. Vuillard manipulates the dummy to "film" the love scene between Roussel and Marie, against Yasushi Kamata’s cleverly impressionistic rendition of Schumann’s Arabesque. Another gem is the memorable final image, featuring Vuillard observing his flickering friends as the lights, a clever and soft design by Yael Lubetsky, fade back into a blank canvas.

I am certainly hoping to see more of these dramatic movement tales by Morrison’s newly formed company, aptly labeled Cross Stitch.

Terrible Infant
reviewed by Gregg Bellon

Sometimes a “period piece” is just about aesthetic: the style of dress, the composure of the characters, or the decadence/dilapidation of the surroundings. Christopher Van Stander’s Terrible Infant takes us back to 1842 Schenectady, New York, to a provincial playhouse that will rid you of the notion that a career in “Theatre” is a glamorous lifestyle. But with this uneven production, Van Stander’s themes and intent get muddled by inconsistencies in the performances, though played on a beautifully designed minimalist set and adorned in eloquent and transformative costumes.

Young Master Henry Brooks (Steven Kaplan) travels the Northeast with his father (Lance Spellerberger), engaged as a guest artist with a prodigious repertoire of Shakespearean leading men, most notably Hamlet and Romeo. The androgynous Henry, who claims to be only 12, is the kind of side-show attraction that increases box office receipts; as the play begins, an impresario named Mr. Duffy (Edwin C. Owens), after some hard-nosed negotiating with Papa Brooks and a supposedly revelatory audition by Henry, agrees to “engage” young Master Brooks at $60 per performance.

Duffy’s playhouse employs a repertory anchored by the alluring ingénue Emma Downs (Melissa Schneider), who is naturally given some of the juiciest moments, embodying a freedom and abandon that threatens the old guard paternalism of Duffy and the elder Brooks. The fulcrum of the play occurs when Emma, in a flourish of actorly agility gets Brooks to leave her alone with Henry for an introductory rehearsal, wherein she plans to reveal and expose his ruse. The scene between these two young, yet wise and weathered, characters speaks to the truth of a common understanding that leads to almost conspiratorial communion.

The central focus of Van Stander’s treatise (that I realized only after reading a long dramaturgical explanation in the program later) seems to be the early labor movement that led to Child-Labor Laws protecting the real victims of capitalism and its bottom-line mentality. Emma and Henry are poster-children for the cause, but what I observed on-stage dealt more with pedophilia and paternalistic coercion than with social reform.

The adults outperform the younger actors, with Spellerberger’s Brooks the embodiment of cold villainous classicism and Owens’ Duffy a masterful conglomerate of Shakespearean fools and clowns, the consummate Player King. If director Mahayana Landowne’s point here is to suggest that the old guard would be vanquished by the passion of youth, the youth it seems are not well-equipped to take on the responsibility.

Credit is due to Ai Hayatsu for her representational, easily-morphed set, especially the muslin scrim that allows for the backlighting of actors while offstage to create wonderful silhouettes and expand the playing space layers; and to Oana Botez Ban for her exquisite costume design, articulating the narrative with accessorized touches such as a corset for Henry and extremely oversized sleeves for Duffy’s silk shirt. The aesthetic is the message, though, because at the play’s climax the sound effect of a rioting crowd offstage drowns out the dialogue of the four characters finally confronting their realities after Henry’s dramatic performance.

Haole
reviewed by Saviana Stanescu

Autobiographical one-person-shows are always interesting to a certain extent, as all of us have a compelling story to tell. It does require an amount of talent and wit though to make that story cross the bridge towards the audience. Writer and performer Cindy Keiter has all of that plus a humorous way of advertising herself—an imaginary interview with David Letterman in the printed program provides the necessary information about how this production of Haole (Pronounced Howl-EE) was born.

Cindy was looking for a celebrity to write about for a new one-woman-show to be performed at Manhattan Theatre Source. Through a process of elimination (the topic of celebrities’ tarnished image was not that appealing to her), she came closer to the very inner circle of one’s own “celebrities”: the family. The show ended up being about her father, the hard-working sportscaster Les Keiter.

Using only a bench placed in the center of the performing space, Cindy is “surfing” on the waves of her memories. She recounts, with humor and care, her (and her twin sister Jody’s) birth, their childhood, their relationship with their very busy father, the family’s vacations and then relocation to Hawaii, her own passion for surfing, her first marathon competition, her coming back to New York City to study drama, etc.

Director Padraic Lillis has shaped the performance in a meaningful and precise manner, allowing the actress to recreate events, places, and people and make them live in front of the audience, using a minimal set and a few well chosen props.

Keiter begins the show in the surfing position, with the line ”I’m waiting for a wave.” I don’t have the power to send her the wave she deserves, but you—yes, you, the one reading these words—her future audience, you might have some connections in the “Weather & Success” Department!

Back from the Front
reviewed by Riley MacLeod

I have a thing for war plays, at least in part because I have a twin sister in the military who will be bound for Iraq sometime soon. Consequently, when I saw the subtitle “a dark comedy” under the title of Back from the Front, I had a moment of hesitation. But with the Republicans on their way in less than a week, I knew I needed a good laugh. I was ready for anything.

What I received was a thought-provoking, high-energy comedy by Lynn Rosen about a family who discovers that their son, who is believed to be MIA, is returning to their home on Thanksgiving Day. As this quirky and delightful family dismantles all of their coping mechanisms and opens their arms to welcome their Robbie home, Robbie appears in the form of an Asian man who government worker-cum-friend Carlos Sanchez (delightfully and skillfully portrayed by Erin Gann) insists is their son. The new Robbie proves himself by rattling off facts about the Walker family and he is soon accepted, with disastrous consequences to those who doubt that he is who he says.

The cast has excellent chemistry and a vitality that keeps this show rocketing along. Adam Green plays Robbie's brother Lenny with a quirky performance reminiscent of the recent film Napoleon Dynamite. Antionette LaVecchia maintains mother Wendy Walker’s die-hard blind optimism straight through the show, even as the truth violently attempts to shatter her fantasies. David Jenkins is a little bit scary as Hal, the Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder-riddled neighbor who bursts in and out of the scene with metaphors and threats. Director Giovanna Sardelli keeps the ten-person cast together and moving with skillful bouts of physical comedy and excellent use of space and props.

While hilariously taking on war, government, race, and television, this play also raised some deep questions in my mind. At one point “Robbie” wishes he were back at the front, saying “At least I knew who the bad guys were then. At least I think I did.” Who is the real enemy these days? The mother’s life-giving hope ultimately destroys her family when all she wants is to keep it together, to keep up the illusion of safety, belonging and truth. How far will people go to maintain the illusion of safety? How does one create an identity and mesh it into the whole, especially when the whole itself is divided and coming apart? What does it mean to be a family and a nation? Where is the line drawn between the war and the front? Hilarious, enjoyable, and deep, Back from the Front is an excellent and thought-provoking night of theatre.