Phoebe in Winter

As I have said before, and as I will undoubtedly say again next summer, Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival is consistently, year after year, one of the places to reliably find exciting new plays, not just staged but staged well, with production values and talent that would be the envy of many a longer-running show. Phoebe in Winter definitely falls directly into that wheelhouse: it’s an ambitious, complicated script, dark enough in its subject matter and tone that I can imagine many a theatre finding it risky and tricky in the ways it operates sometimes almost entirely on a metaphorical/allegorical level. It’s got a terrific cast (including some perpetual faves like Bobby Moreno and Jeanine Serralles, as well as some wonderful actors I’ve never seen before, notably Chinasa Ogbuagu).  For the first time, though, I had a few quibbles with direction and staging choices, but I still say, go see it. (If you can. It may well be sold out by now for the remainder of its very brief run.)

It’s uncomfortable to watch, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Full review here.

Adventures in “edgy” theater: the manufactured versus the messy

I saw two plays this week: one I reviewed on a hopeful whim, and the other I went to with high hopes that were disappointed in a way I would not have expected.

Murder Ballad played to great acclaim at City Center last fall, and recently opened for a commercial transfer at the Union Square Theater; one lead performer has been replaced but otherwise the production is, I believe, virtually the same as it was uptown. I think it’s going to be a smashing success, but more because it seems pitched precisely for a commercial audience than because I actually liked it.

The first surprise, for me, was how bland the music is, compared to the other musicals in its sort of rock-musical wheelhouse:  Rent (which for the record, I hated with a fiery passion) has songs you can’t help but come out singing even if, like me, you were enraged by the show. I saw Waterwell’s Goodbar well over a year ago and I still occasionally get its glam-rock-inflected tunes running through my head. (Not to mention my all-time favorite piece of mesmerizingly bad musical theatre, the late-nineties adaptation of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, which was insane but whose soundtrack I listen to today…and to which I could swear several songs here allude musically.) The performers, especially the insanely good Rebecca Naomi Jones, give it their all, but the songs all sort of blended together, the lyrics are sometimes painful in their rhyming choices, and all of it felt earnestly humorless. I think they’re going for the archetypal unspecificity of the fairy tale, but instead it just felt bland.

But above and beyond that, what claims to be a downtown story of passion that leads to murder felt to me really, mostly a story about how an Upper West Side couple can go back to leading a perfectly conventional Upper West Side life after the unhappy wife makes a doomed foray back to her downtown lifestyle. I felt a nasty undertone of slut-shaming (Sarah, the wife, apologizes for her infidelity by lamenting the “filth” she tracked into their home), and—mild spoiler alert—there’s an aura of madonna-versus-whore in the way the titular murder ultimately plays out. There’s also a lack of heat in everyone but Jones…and everyone but Jones would in fact be the love triangle (wife, husband, and wife’s former lover) at the heart of the play.

I’m not saying it’s an unenjoyable way to spend 90 minutes: the production is energetic and kinetic and puts most of the audience right in the action physically. But (major spoiler alert) the more I think about it, the more it feels to me like a valediction of Bloomberg’s New York: a place where downtown (not to mention bars and intellectual pursuits—Sarah’s husband, Michael, is a poetry PhD before he meets her and becomes a responsible grownup to support their family) is a place where people dip a toe before moving to the Upper West Side, getting their MBA, and becoming proper members of society. (The narrator never seems more excited than in extolling the virtues of Sarah and Michael’s uptown apartment with a doorman.) When Sarah’s unhappiness and boredom threaten to derail that life, the situation needs to be corrected—and while the piece certainly leads you to believe that corrections will come at the expense of the little nuclear family unit, it ultimately plays out in a way that lets them live happily ever after.

Compare this to the other thing I saw this week, Stop the Tempo, a Romanian play getting its US premiere courtesy of Origin Theatre Company at the Lower East Side music club Arlene’s Grocery. I’m a sucker for well-done site-specific theatre, and I’m interested in translated works coming out of Europe and South America, which are a lot harder to come by than they ought to be. So I went out of intellectual curiosity rather than specific expectations. The play is rough around the edges, absolutely, and at times feels more like a sketch than a finished piece of work. But it’s still got energy, passion, genuine anger, social commentary about both its specific place and time and the woes of an entire generation, and more, well, genuine edge in its first couple of minutes than I felt out of Murder Ballad. Full review here.

The Mercy Killers

One-person plays are, in some ways, the essence of theater, looking back to its roots in storytelling: a performer, an audience, a room. Done right, solo work (either of the autobiographical or the more crafted play-for-one-character variety) can hit a nerve like nothing else, because you the audience are the other characters in the piece; you’re the interlocutor. But when it doesn’t work, it’s deadly; there’s nothing to save either audience or performer from the dead air in the room.

Mercy Killers, part of terraNOVA Collective’s annual soloNOVA festival, falls somewhere in the middle. Writer/performer Michael Milligan is a tremendously engaging performer, but the character he created felt a little like a straw man to me, like a conscious attempt to write a “typical American” guy, put together out of elements that fall between archetype and cliche.

Read the review here.

Pinkolandia

The play’s politics, its family melodrama, and, all in all, its adult characters turn out to be much less interesting than the way it paints the intersection between worlds of imagination and worlds of reality. It’s about twenty minutes too long, I think, but otherwise well worth seeing.

Note to the monolingual: as might have been expected given the subject and the presenting theatre, a substantial portion of the play is in Spanish (something like 25 percent). My Spanish is at best mediocre; I understood enough of the gist, most of the time to follow (though there were definitely jokes that the majority of the audience got and I did not), but if you have zero comprehension of Spanish, you might find sections of this challenging.

Full review here.

Core Values: a theatrical day at the office

A play that pretty much replicates the worst day you’ve ever had at your low-rent corporate day job can be a hard sell (especially when you as an audience member are pretty sure you’ve spent more days like that than the actors performing it have), but I thought Ars Nova did nice work with Core Values anyway. It’s not necessarily the kind of play I like best (I tend to prefer slightly less realist and, well, more theatrical, for lack of a better word, kinds of things), but done with a great deal of craft. And I thought it really nicely captured the weird intimacy of office demi-friendships.

Full review here.

Sleeping Rough

Sleeping Rough was a hard play to write about; it seems to me that its real subject isn’t exactly the death all its characters are mourning. The real sadness in the play comes from the middle-aged parents suddenly confronting the people they’ve become, and the loss, in losing their son, of their own youth. I’m not sure it all quite adds up, but it was very moving.

Read my full review here.

A Dream Play

This was an unusually hard piece of theatre to write about. It was enjoyable to watch in almost the way you watch opera (or the way I, the completely uninformed viewer, watch opera, anyway)—washing over you in an atmospheric and, well, dreamy way. But very, very difficult to pin down and analyze in the way I usually think about a review. But, deadlines are deadlines and although I’m not completely satisfied with this, it did get done.

Another disappointing night at the theatre

This one is, perhaps, partially my own fault. I agreed to review Breakfast at Tiffany’s feeling absolutely certain that it was a musical. It is not. I’m not sure a musical adaptation would have been advisable either, but I feel like it might have inspired the show’s creators to think a little more concretely about how to make the piece theatrical. Instead, it felt like a very literal importation of the book, with a few changes thrown in for the sake of modernity (like concerted focus on the main character’s sexuality) or political palatability (like the Japanese character’s concern with his interned cousins on the West Coast). Oh, well.

Find the review here.

Belleville

Perhaps I’ve suddenly become (even more of) a curmudgeon, but I’m finding an increasing number of creative works (movies, TV, and plays more than books, though books, too) that are mistaking “thoroughly hateful” for “edgy” or “interesting,” and presenting characters notable mainly for their self-absorption. I’m not going to say that central characters need to be admirable, even likeable—but you’ve got to give me a reason to engage with them, and to understand them, and to be willing to spend time with them.

I hated every minute of the time I spent with the main characters of Belleville, people who, if one believes the play’s premise, have spent five years living a life of almost complete dishonesty and misery, with no self-knowledge to show for it. (Having said that, the premise and the whole back-story seemed questionably conceived to me. Spoiler alert, but: if someone who claims to be attending the last two years of medical school is not in fact attending medical school, that person has been finding someplace to go for all of his days and at least three nights a week without his wife noticing, not to mention that whatever person or institution was previously paying the tuition might have noticed the difference. Yes, the wife is depressed and not paying all that much attention to her surroundings, but…did they never have a conversation about what he did all day? Did she never encounter any of his former medical school classmates at the grocery store?)

Anyway: full review at nytheatre.com, as ever.

The Revisionist: lifestyles of the young and privileged (part 3,427)

As someone who was once an artistically minded twenty-something girl, who moved to New York in search of glamour and love and excitement and all of those things, I should have some sort of connection with the central characters of Girls. And yet, somehow, I mostly only find them annoying, as, I suppose, I felt about the bohemian squatters of Rent before them. Because as privileged as my friends and I some ways were, and as clueless, and as starry-eyed, we never believed that the world owed us anything, that our success would come naturally and by right (or, often, at all), or that we were sacrificing our artistic integrity and spiritual purity by acknowledging that whatever our dreams were, we also had to pay the damn rent and cobble together a living.

I know the current state of the economy makes that harder, and I know we’re not entirely supposed to like, let alone respect the choices of, any of these characters, but there’s still a blitheness to their confidence in their own freedom to make such choices, because they have a safety net, that I find exhausting to watch.

Which is all by way of saying that I had much the same reaction to the central character in The Revisionist, a new play written by and starring actor Jesse Eisenberg. Again, I’m not sure you’re meant to approve of or even like Eisenberg’s character, but if you can’t at least tolerate him or find something watchable or engaging about him, there’s not much in the play to hang on to. Full review at nytheatre.com, as ever: click here.