tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57402828388391884382024-03-07T02:01:30.951-05:00'külPronounce it.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.comBlogger1201125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-68925438780804750152013-03-09T01:11:00.001-05:002013-03-09T01:11:32.334-05:00THEATER: rogerandtom + TrevorOh yeah, we're still covering off-off-Broadway -- <i>Trevor </i>deserves a larger venue (and much larger audience) pronto . . . I'm looking at you, Second Stage! And <i>rogerandtom </i>breaks the fourth wall in an unexpectedly recursive way. Clever, yes, but not too much for its own good!<br />
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Check out the reviews at <a href="http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com/">the new site</a>; direct links <a href="http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/theater-it-hurts-to-laugh-in-trevor/">here</a> and <a href="http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/theater-rogerandtom-presents-a-valuable-lesson-in-breaking-the-rules/">here</a>.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-6464008550294975802013-03-03T22:22:00.002-05:002013-03-03T22:22:12.547-05:00THEATER: BellevilleCome join me over at the new site, won't you, as I talk about the ticking trust bomb at the suspenseful heart of <a href="http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/theater-bellevilles-beautiful-or-is-it-a-study-in-the-suspense-of-trust/">Amy Herzog's quite enjoyable <i>Belleville</i></a>.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-49129037717855179972013-02-28T15:35:00.000-05:002013-02-28T01:27:50.482-05:00A Note to ReadersIt's been one week of the experiment over at <a href="http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com/">http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com</a>/; the hits aren't quite the same yet, but I'm finding Wordpress far more useful, and more in line with the sort of criticism I'd like to be doing. If you haven't already bookmarked that page, please do; it's likely where I'll be posting from now on.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-2454777969256486302013-02-28T01:26:00.000-05:002013-02-28T01:26:06.318-05:00Here's Looking At You, Resident Evil 7<br />
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Enough has been said about how terrible <em>Resident Evil 6</em> is, from the ridiculous story and the lack of horror to the spotty controls, awkwardly laid-out zones, poor scenarios (driving sequences?), and unexplained mechanics (like the sudden use of spotlights). Instead, let's look at what <em>worked</em>; i.e., if you could strip this rotting zombie of a game of the useful portions and graft them onto a better game, which mutations would you take?</div>
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First off, the concept of four separate campaigns, each emphasizing a particular strength of the <em>Resident Evil </em>series, is a smart something-for-everyone approach. Ada features puzzles and (new to the series) stealth, Jake revolves around escape sequences and melee combat, Chris is a full on cover-shooter, and Leon is a tight-quarters next-generation survival-horror game. The fact that each of these individual sections is half-cooked is beside the point; there's a ton of content here, and by breaking the game down into easily digestible chapters, <em>Resident Evil 6</em> caters to hardcore and casual players. The <strong>drop-in, drop-out</strong> <strong>co-op</strong> isn't bad either, though random matchmaking can ruin this almost as much as the poor AI that's supposedly on your side; far more salvageable is the use of <strong>parallel</strong> <strong>narratives</strong>, in which the various campaigns bleed into one another. The story isn't interesting enough to justify four different perspectives, but it could have been, and the <strong>intersecting co-op</strong>, in which two players may suddenly find themselves together with two more, is a neat feature for the boss fights. (It's a shame they're then so gimmicky and not at all reliant on actual teamwork.)</div>
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Second, the idea of <strong>allowing human players to take over the AI</strong> in the so-called Agent Hunt is a genius one. Mind you, it's not at all developed, and it's awkwardly integrated for both the humans -- who, regardless of difficulty settings, will encounter more monsters than ever (infinitely spawning, if they get stuck in one of the poorly laid-out and map-less areas) -- and for the zombies, who each have their own unexplained control schemes. But the basic idea of having devious players go back through to grief those who followed in their footsteps is a smart one, especially if the AI is able to actually process the various tactics humans use and to replicate them further on down the line. (Adaptive AI, pulling from all of RE.NET's player experiences.) We're not at that point yet, but as next-generation systems come onto the market with their advanced processing power, and designers continue to implement twists on a once-tired AI formula, we may have games that are challenging not because of reduced/increased damage modifiers but because of unexpected behaviors that keep us on our feet.</div>
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Third, <strong>limitless weapons</strong> have been a long time coming to <em>Resident Evil</em>, at least ever since it decided to abandon its low-ammo, actual survival-horror roots. In this newest installment, you have infinite inventory space for weapons -- the only thing that's limited is how much ammo you can carry. (Hopefully this will be phased out, too.) In the past, players have had to randomly stumble through each area, getting by with whichever weapons they happened to choose to bring with them, even though other gear might have suited the situation far better, had they but known. The point is not to trick the player with what they cannot possibly see coming, but to provide them with the tools they need in order to deal with everything that's thrown at them. By allowing players to carry every weapon, each with its corresponding strengths and weaknesses, <em>Resident Evil 6 </em>was able to throw a wide variety of enemy types at the player, particularly with the clever J'avo mutations. The sooner that players also have infinite room for ammunition (or better yet, universal ammo, ala <em>Dead Space 3</em>), the better, because that's when we're tested not on pointless conservation (using the Handgun against every foe, lest we be short on ammo that we need later) but our quick-witted responses, which is really what you want in an action game anyway.</div>
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Finally, I'd actually keep the <strong>one-hit killing monsters</strong>. If you're going the horror route, there's nothing more frightening than an invulnerable foe that can kill you if only it can catch you. But I wouldn't make their ability to kill you so cheesy, with quick-time events (QTEs) popping up out of the blue, poor dodging mechanics getting in your way, or a failure to communicate what you're supposed to be doing. Keep the controls fixed, not the fight itself -- we shouldn't inexplicably die because of something unforeseeable; we should die because we failed to heed the game's naturally occurring advice.</div>
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I've played a lot of indie games lately, and the one thing that I can praise above all else is their internal consistency and deliberate choices, things that keep them from going all-out with a AAA kitchen-sink-style approach, as with <i>Resident Evil 6</i>, a game that could've been great if it had only focused. Trial-and-error has no place in a top-shelf game like this, but at least we can all point out the successful designs (even things as small as the lovely aesthetics on the HUD), so that if we must be subjected to endless sequels, we at least eventually get <em>better </em>ones.</div>
Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-83047736958984161762013-02-24T14:58:00.003-05:002013-02-24T14:58:56.562-05:00So, Steven Soderbergh Is Quitting Cinema Because People Are Stupid (And the Oscars Prove It)<br />
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Mary Kaye Schilling catches the always candid and often eloquent Steven Soderbergh on the eve of his retirement in an article for <em>New York</em>'s February 4, 2013 issue, and for me, the most interesting takeaway is the thought of just how much audiences -- both those producing and those watching films -- have shifted since the man's career began in in 1989 with <em>sex, lies, and videotape</em>. I feel his pain: though I've got nowhere near as much experience as the man, especially within the industry, the statement that "when I see a movie that's doing the obvious thing all the time, it's frustrating" resonates with me, and reminds me of what I said earlier this week when I noted that whether a <a data-mce-href="http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/who-says-art-needs-to-make-sense/" href="http://thatsoundscool.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/who-says-art-needs-to-make-sense/">piece of art makes sense to me or not</a>, I want it to at least stand distinct from other things. How can you not admire Soderbergh for the variety of cinematic styles he's tried in the last two years alone, or for the fact that when he worked on <em>Contagion</em>, he cut almost an hour of material because he wanted to "take advantage of what that subject had to offer while avoiding disaster-movie cliches," which made him "think laterally, which was good." Obviously the man's frustrated with a world that apparently rewards the lazy unoriginality of <i>A Good Day To Die Hard</i>, or an industry that appears to no longer to respect those who make great movies, only those who make financially successful ones. No wonder he no longer wants to make films for an audience that's bewildered by ambiguity: "I remember during previews for [<em>Contagion</em>] how upset the audience was by the Jude Law character.<strong> The fact that he created a sort of mixed reaction was viewed as a flaw in the filmmaking</strong>. Not, 'Oh, that's interesting. I'm not sure if this guy is an asshole or a hero.' People were really <em>annoyed</em> by that."</div>
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The conclusion he reaches is similar to the one I've arrived at:</div>
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I think that the audience for the kinds of movies I grew up liking has migrated to television. The format really allows for the narrow and deep approach that I like, and a lot of people . . . Well, the point is, three and a half million people watching a show on cable is a success. That many people seeing a movie is not a success. <strong>I just don't think movies matter as much anymore, culturally</strong>.</blockquote>
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The more I think about this, the more I realize that there really aren't all that many exceptions to the rule, even on the Oscar shortlist. <em>Life of Pi </em>loses much of its effectiveness in the shift from being within the author's head to a visual medium; <em>Django Unchained </em>is undeniably beautiful, but not really all that revealing; <em>Les Miserables </em>does one risk-taking thing over and over again until it's driven into the ground; <em>Beasts of the Southern Wild </em>only feels as if it's something new because it's covering an overlooked environment in a magical style but I'd rather watch <em>In America </em>or <i>The Fall</i>; <em> </em><em>Zero Dark Thirty </em>and <em>Argo </em>are both taking varying degrees of flak over their fidelity, though this seems fairly forgivable in the latter's case; and while I haven't yet seen <em>Lincoln</em>,<em> </em>I'm not quite sure of its cultural impact, though I've high hopes given the actors and director that it'll be a somewhat penetrating look into a specific point in history. (<em>Silver Linings Playbook </em>and <em>Amour </em>are the two films I'm most looking forward to seeing, but still; that's two films in an entire year?)</div>
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Of course, while <em>films </em>may not matter as much, the act of <em>watching </em>films is apparently bigger than ever. <strong>If you don't watch the Oscars tonight, or at least attend a party about them, your friends may mock you</strong>. Live tweeting the awards is just one more step removed from the meditative way in which one once lost themselves in the flickering cinema lights. The cultural impact of a film is less in the way it affects us personally but in the way it affects our self-identity; how many people on their first date inevitably fall back not on discussing a film but on films they happen to like, films that they think reflect positively upon themselves. (<em>Requiem for a Dream</em>, <em>Ratatouille</em>, <em>Almost Famous</em>, if you must know.) This gets back to the superficiality that Soderbergh is fleeing in the cinemas, and which he rightly despises in critics, who he believes to be "easily fooled" and who "praise things that [he feels] are not up to snuff." Here's a chilling statement about criticism (and, on a larger scale, the everyone's-a-critic implications):</div>
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I find critics to be very facile when they don't like a film, but when they do like something they get tongue tied.</blockquote>
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If we can't explain what we like, and often simply dismiss what we don't, is it no wonder that bad films are proliferating the market? Overwhelming an audience before it can respond seems to be the best way to make a profit, and so perhaps Soderbergh's correct in shifting attention to television, particularly shows like <em>Mad Men </em>and <em>Breaking Bad </em>that take a deeper, long-form narrative response, and which, because they give audiences the chance to tune out with each passing week, must do more to earn back viewers than any other medium. Here's hoping that AMC and HBO were reading this interview and are savvy enough to lock Soderbergh up in the development of a new television series while they've got the opportunity.</div>
Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-17974382933956389322013-02-22T23:48:00.002-05:002013-02-22T23:48:25.328-05:00Makes No Sense At All<br />
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"Yes, but it is art?" is entirely the wrong question, if for no other reason than that it doesn't matter. We're talking about an entirely subjective thing here, and while we may get wrapped up in the absurdity of the art <em>market</em> and the distracting valuation of something that simply <em>is</em>, for better or worse. The truth is that judging art is beside the point: either you appreciate the Harlem Shake, or you don't. Either you're moved, perhaps Stendhal style, by seeing the Mona Lisa up close, or you wonder what all the fuss is about. <em>Step Up: Revolution </em><a data-mce-href="http://www.metacritic.com/movie/step-up-revolution" href="http://www.metacritic.com/movie/step-up-revolution">has a 43% Metacritic rating</a>, but that's if you're critiquing it as a film, which is inane. The dances and dancers are beautiful, Amanda Brody's script is not: the central conflict involves a dance crew attempting to be the first group to reach 10,000,000 hits on YouTube (as if some random singing cat won't do that overnight); also, while the prize is $100,000, the crew surely spends at least that much putting together their elaborate flash-mob sequences -- it's like <em>Ocean's Eleven: Dance Edition. </em>It's all effortlessly presented, too, such that the crew's resident street artist (who, like Teller, apparently never speaks . . . until he does) literally welds together a giant robot in the four minutes it takes to perform one of these pieces. It's ridiculous and hardly applicable to the real world, in which there'd be some sweat and tears along the way, and yet isn't the central theme of the film, of art, to break rules in the name of a greater ideal? <em>Step Up: Revolution </em>isn't trying to reflect the world as it is, it's not even idealizing what it could be. It's pure fantasy, and ought to be accepted as such.</div>
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The same can be said of <em>Glee </em>when it's at its best: don't try to justify the fact that all of these economically challenged students who live in the middle of nowhere Ohio (population 38,693) are somehow able to cobble together -- in one year -- a Glee club capable of competing on a National level, that its two leads are <em>both </em>accepted into the most prestigious (and fictional) arts academy out there and that despite not having jobs or incomes are able to live in (and beautifully decorate) a million-dollar loft in New York City, and those are just the most plausible of the various plot lines. <em>Glee </em>plays to hyper-stylized emotions rather than actual character, it attempts to be everything to everyone all at once, and would collapse -- as its gloomier, more realistic, and hands-down <em>better </em>rival <em>Smash </em>is doing -- if you believed in any of it. But when the characters spontaneously burst into song, the band just happens to be there to back them up, everybody always knows all the words to every song in the world, and choreography ain't no thang, none of the writing actually matters. You're watching a performance that is markedly standing <em>out </em>from the rest of that nonsense, and perhaps suddenly you realize that you're having an emotional reaction because you let your defenses down and stopped caring so much and trying to fit everything into a rigid order. <em>Glee </em>is chaotic, but does that make it bad? As series creator Ryan Murphy proved, and again on <em>American Horror Story</em>, rules are an inconvenient thing when it comes to creating something artistic, something new. Art that follows rules is, by definition, paint-by-numbers.</div>
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Which leads us, full circle, back to the new media art -- viral videos, like the Harlem Shake -- that should work, but do. They captivate because they are different, aided in part by their short form and low-cost production values, like the pencil sketches an artist does and distributes on a napkin before eventually completing their masterpiece. Blossoms like Gangnam Style are original, rebellious thoughts that need no justification. However, while the inevitable parodies that turn a single video into an Internet meme can be clever and artistic in of themselves, they are following the rules of the original, which is why they play to diminishing returns. Even when they churn out hits, Weird Al and Richard Cheese are known quantities: they have formulas. <em>Glee </em>and <em>Step Up: Revolution</em>, on the other hand, are utterly unpredictable in their musical or choreographed numbers -- each larger-than-life moment surprises, especially as the script that surrounds them grows duller and more predictable. We expect to find art in a museum -- perhaps that is why it does so little for people like me who encounter it there. But to find art in schlock, or buried beside a billion other videos-of-the-moment? It doesn't make any sense . . . but who says art needs to make sense?</div>
Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-86247993519216895072013-02-22T03:29:00.002-05:002013-11-25T12:47:36.502-05:00An Ode to King of the Nerds<br />
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There's a mistaken belief out there that reality television is a cheap substitute for scripted programming: you don't have to write anything, the cast is generally replaceable after fifteen minutes or a season (whichever comes first), and product placement is even easier here than on, say, a game show because contestants pull double-duty as "celebrity" endorsers. This is perhaps true for follow-cam shows: you know, the ones in which a camera crew follows around a larger-than-life personality and then a bunch of lawyers and a sweatshop of tortured editors cobble together footage that demonstrates what life is "really" like . . . at least, for those of us who spend their lives with cameras following them around. But as with most stigmatized cultures, there's an entire hierarchy of such programming, and while the sleaziest may be the voyeuristic shows that are so obviously (or obliviously) fake that they need to put the word "Real" in their names, you've also got a wide variety of competition-based shows, some of which actually require skills and others which avoid pandering to demographic stereotypes by taking voting decisions <em>out </em>of America's hands. At the bottom of this food chain, you've got your gimmick-packed, celebrity judged "talent" shows that are about as jingoistic as it gets; higher up the ladder, you've got specialized and more refined programming that focuses on food, dancing, dragging. And then, at the top, there's <em>King of the Nerds</em>, which I don't think anybody's actually watching, but which is subversively entertaining. <em><br /></em></div>
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A few disclaimers, first. My favorite reality competition is another little-seen gem, <em>Solitary</em>, and I'm a long-time watcher of <em>Survivor</em>. These two shows are reality competitions, but they're also heavily scripted: writers have to come up with clever challenges, casting directors have to find charismatic characters, and hosts need enough information fed to them to actually carry on an intelligent conversation with the cast -- one that might change the outcome of the program itself. It's also worth noting that I think sticking <em>similar</em> people in a house is ultimately far more interesting than putting disparate professions together, especially when they have to later face off, ala <em>Last Comic Standing </em>or <em>The Ultimate Fighter</em>, two shows that are far more similar than they seem at first title. (Similar personalities works, too, though only if you're looking for a train-wreck, as in the ego-clashing glory of <em>The Celebrity Apprentice</em>, which could just as easily be called <em>So Meatloaf, Dennis Rodman, and Gary Busey Walk Into A Bar and Search For Relevance And God In the Presence of Donald Trump</em>.) I think <em>So You Think You Can Dance </em>is probably the most <em>positive </em>and polished of the performance-based shows, but I'm generally in awe of physically impressive feats. (Emphasis here is on <i>impressive</i>, so humiliation-based competitions, like <em>Wipeout, </em>are no good and in their episodic format are closer to game shows than reality television.)</div>
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So for those of you who <em>have </em>been watching, it should come as no surprise that I enjoy <em>King of the Nerds</em>, and not just because the references are entirely at my level. (<i>Dance Central 3 </i>makes a pivotal appearance, but there's no <em>Rock Band</em>, and I'm disappointed that Chess is the go-to board game and not <em>Settlers of Catan </em>or a more complex all-day euro-game like <em>Twilight Struggle.</em>) After all, the casting is impeccable, with people all over the emotional/social spectrum, to say nothing of varying degrees of mental capacity, from Alana Smith-Brown's leper-like claim to fame as "a comic-book fan" (who will later be eliminated in a comic-book challenge) to Hendrik's over-compensatory intellect as a geophysics engineer at MIT who, thinking he had something to prove, wound up voting <em>himself</em> into a one-on-one elimination round. You might complain that some cast members, like game designer Ivan Van Norman or NASA engineer Moogega Cooper, aren't nerdy <em>enough</em> -- but that's sort of the point. These people may have been picked on, or picked last, but they're all comfortable in their own skin -- at least, comfortable enough to be exploited on a show that "forces" them to live in a mansion called Nerdvania, a place filled with giant twenty-sided dice and Batman statues, to say nothing of the Radio Shack gadget room. They've got to be in on the joke, especially a hacker like Virgil Griffith, who doesn't mind being caricaturized as the scheming villain of the show . . . because he's straightforward and logical enough to know that his actions, no matter how malicious they may seem, are the right <em>moves</em>. Even the pink-haired game vlogger Danielle Mackey ultimately embraces the way she's being edited, shifting from a whiny brat to being, well . . . a whiny brat who <em>owns </em>it. Confessionals are often repetitive and cocky bits, spliced together after the fact to make a character seem less intelligent than they are; here, they take on a meta-level, for everyone's smart enough to self-edit and analyze exactly what's going on around them, and to offer up clever commentary on <em>that</em>.</div>
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As Virgil confides, however, nobody on the show is Spock. They're intelligent, but they're also young -- all of them in their mid-twenties -- and often filled with emotional quirks or insecurities, as with the creative and gangly Genevieve Pearson or the anxious professional gamer Celeste Anderson, who most likely got hooked on video games so that she wouldn't have to compete in real-world activities. And here's where the writing comes in: challenges need to push and prod to get these self-defining nerds to compete in identifiably nerdy activities while at the same time pushing them outside of their comfort zones. It has to teach the viewing audience about nerd culture, pandering to broad and accessible stereotypes, but at the same time be intelligent enough to actually have the contestants compete. For instance: solving a sudoku puzzle is too simplistic, but what if they first have to take on a physical challenge like assemble the pieces of a giant Rubik's Cube to get the initial orientation of numbers on the grid? Cosplay -- dressing up as a character -- or LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) are niche activities, and therefore easy to gawk at, especially since they're being taken so seriously. (Consider that Kevin Smith was brought on a guest judge for a Comic Book Debate, or that the musical-comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates helped to critique each team's "Nerd Anthem." These are serious credentials, though it's a shame that Jonathan Coulton wasn't available.)</div>
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If there's any real complaint with <em>King of the Nerds</em>, it's that it's not nearly challenging enough. Why hasn't a team had to build a robot and teach it to break dance? Why hasn't there been a mini puzzle hunt (of the MIT difficulty) in which the teams race to finish first? Then again, if the show were a true competition of nerd knowledge (remember <em>Beat the Geeks</em>?) or technical ability, it'd be a lot harder to laugh at. The joke is on the producers, though; whereas the similarly styled <em>Who Wants To Be A Superhero? </em>could only mock its (game) cast, the crew on <em>King of the Nerds </em>is smart enough to play this game for what it is -- entertaining television. Much as you may want to simply dismiss and laugh at each participant, they're actually forging friendships and feeling bad at having to send someone home each week, which is more than you can say of the soulless denizens of <em>Big Brother </em>or the occasionally offensive (and/or racist) specimens that show up on <em>The Amazing Race</em>, for laughs. It's hard to imagine that the writers aren't in on it, especially since they've gone through the trouble of dressing up the hosts (Robert Carradine and Curtis Armstrong, of <em>Revenge of the Nerds</em>) as the truly ridiculous ones, though some points have to be deducted for forcing the cast to eat Little Caesars week after week.</div>
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But hey, the acknowledged artificiality of <em>King of the Nerds</em>, much like the campy special effects of early yet beloved science fiction programming, is part of what makes it all so shamelessly addictive. Besides, the prize is a Throne of Games, and who can resist wordplay like that? Not this nerd.</div>
Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-80389554664612641432013-02-21T12:51:00.000-05:002013-02-21T12:51:03.645-05:00metaDRAMA: What Are You Writing For?<br />
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In a recent issue of <em>The New Republic</em>, Adam Kirsch writes of the decline of the essay, describing even good writers such as John Jeremiah Sullivan (or, one would imagine, Michael Pollan) as performance pieces that mask the author rather than expose them alongside their subject. In so doing, he worries that the prose "claims the authenticity of non-fiction while indulging, with the reader's tacit permission, in the invention and shaping of fiction." Elsewhere in that issue, Adam Thirlwell discusses a different inspiration to the modern author: Baudelaire, who found a new format for his writing -- a "confessional mode" grounded in humiliation, in which the truly beautiful could only be grasped through "the banal and ubiquitous, through the everyday dresses and make-up and sex lives of one's era." According to Thirlwell, "the ultimate secret" and, accordingly, his strength, was that despite these "apparently flippant digressions and arabesques" he was "totally exposed." In both cases, we cannot perhaps change our feelings or the facts that are being recorded, but we can change our <em>tone</em> about them, and therein create our own style.</div>
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This is what I've been thinking about lately in regards to my own criticism: after all, I've strong opinions on pretty much every subject, even things about which I am terribly under- if not uninformed, and have often relied on this to force others into heatedly correcting me. (I've very much enjoyed playing the devil's advocate; in conversation, I thrill at seeing how others will react to unexpected or absurd lines of inquiry.) But there are now, thankfully, far more voices in the so-called blogosphere writing about the things I initially set out to cover, so there's less of a need for me to fill a void or to call attention to a subject. Moreover, I find myself less excited about certain topics and formats that are increasingly the mainstay of print journalism (or in the web-based orifices of said entities); I'd rather engage than record, and while I'm still passionate about the things I take in, it's perhaps necessary to find another medium, a new voice, in which to express them. In all honesty, the field currently undergoing the greatest renaissance appears to be that of video games, both in regards to the industry's output and the reviewer's response to it. I've read critiques written <a data-mce-href="http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/2/20/4005990/nostalgia-vs-narrative-a-series-of-adventure-game-letters" href="http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/2/20/4005990/nostalgia-vs-narrative-a-series-of-adventure-game-letters">in the form of love letters</a>, I've seen literally first-hand accounts in which <a data-mce-href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MY4HqL0A" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MY4HqL0A">people heatedly discuss their subject as they experience it</a> (or mock it, MST3K style), and in general a more interactive form of wit, collapsing the boundaries between reader and reviewer, reaching a shared experience.</div>
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Not that this is all unique to a particular medium: the ways in which people interact with television and film have drastically changed, as superfans who all-but instantly create video parodies (or sweded homages) become supercritics on a frame-by-frame level, and hatewatching (and the corresponding reading of snarky recaps) practically becomes a gladiatorial bloodsport, giving truth to the lie (or vice-versa) that there is value in every artistic endeavor. Books can be blogged through on a chapter-by-chapter basis, or analyzed line by line, and these close-reads can be annotated directly to your digital texts: things that were once marginalia can now more than define the object itself, and this is probably where essays have most changed -- interaction moving from a more sparing wide-angle lens to a words-are-cheap ultra-zoom. With high-fidelity screenings of live performances--perhaps directly to your home--it's possible that we may consider theater differently, too, although that's most likely going to stem from the more interactive, experiential works (like <em>Sleep No More</em>). The artist will ever define the performative medium as the critic attempts to catch up: there's no tortoise-and-hare-like effect going on here.</div>
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All of which is a long way of saying not that I've given up but rather that I'd like to find some new way for me to talk about the arts-and-entertainment I love. I'd prefer to share an experience rather than render a judgement, or to focus on a specific moment that worked and maybe compare it or apply it to something in the world itself, as opposed to turning it back as a criticism on the larger work itself. Maybe to discuss something in a format other than an essay or your standard capsule review, perhaps with video, perhaps with audio, perhaps with art. Why should I settle or limit myself in the coverage of living, breathing art forms?</div>
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One bit of inspiration I'll certainly be taking on, however, comes from a Q&A with long-time critic Clive James (also published in <em>The New Republic</em>, which has been sending me free issues in the hopes that I'll subscribe). His answer to that oft-asked question of the critic's role is as follows: <i><br /></i></div>
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The thing a critic should do is point toward the things he or she admires, for the benefit of the next generation. I'd like to be able to go back and add things where I thought I was insufficiently attentive to the qualities of a work of art. I'd be less interested now in attacking. Only be hostile in defense of a value.</blockquote>
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As with Thirlwell's discussion of Baudelaire, James also gets to the importance of the everyday. "There were plenty of people who were writing profoundly about the profound stuff," he says, so he focused on the telling nature of the things that weren't being talked about: "the stuff in between the shows, the link material, the sports commentators, the trivia." Did these moments do any less to shape our culture than the art that they candy-coated? Who is to say, ultimately, what observation will give us that lusted-after moment of deep and unifying clarity? To that end, I'll also be attempting to quote, gloss, and otherwise engage with things that I'm not covering -- articles that I've read, episodes that I've watched, games (of any variety) that I've played -- and see what might shake loose (about myself, about the world), similar to the work I've dabbled in at <a data-mce-href="http://shortaday.wordpress.com/" href="http://shortaday.wordpress.com/"><em>fail better</em></a>. But for now, I'll give James a last word of warning, for it cuts to the specificity that I'm seeking: "It hurts everyone's reputation to write too much."</div>
Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-63407442047837607982013-01-26T14:03:00.003-05:002013-01-26T14:06:16.676-05:00THEATER: "Collision" is a Disaster in Slow, Slow Motion<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1ellNntk6BH21vxR5PwO2G9Z8GUfqZGIrX_yW-gx9BmlpFtlGLFgjxzZQ-JS2_VO2UzSb-tow3YovSsedqH7cVzzzC7_nHrz7hFvLZcvl-UROo5_29aZ4SV9ccwicQ8ggRJpIpPRfVr5v/s1600/D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1ellNntk6BH21vxR5PwO2G9Z8GUfqZGIrX_yW-gx9BmlpFtlGLFgjxzZQ-JS2_VO2UzSb-tow3YovSsedqH7cVzzzC7_nHrz7hFvLZcvl-UROo5_29aZ4SV9ccwicQ8ggRJpIpPRfVr5v/s640/D.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Russ Rowland</i></td></tr>
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Once upon a time, to borrow the banal storytelling mechanic used by playwright Lyle Kessler's pretentious philosophers, there was a critic who thought he'd seen more than his share of bad, overwritten plays. Then along came <i>Collision</i>, an awkward and occasionally distasteful tale of collegiate rebels bucking social conventions (often for the sake of bucking social conventions). Empty, broken characters like Doe (Anna Stromberg) and Bromley (Nick Lawson) are made to jump at the whims of Grange (James Kautz), a strong personality who provides them with purpose and the illusion of love. Even Grange's professor, Denton (Michael Cullen), goes from thinking him a sublime but grandiosely narcissistic personality to being a ravenous and cult-like follower; in the most implausible moment of the evening, Grange even convinces Renel (Craig 'muMs' Grant), a street-tough gun dealer with more than enough common sense, to accept a check for his wares.<br />
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To his credit, Mr. Kautz has a feral magnetism that's long made him a standout in the work he's done with the Amoralists (who produced this play), and he's well-matched with Ms. Stromberg, who radiates a far-from-typical vulnerability. (Her character also has the most developed back story; she's closed herself off ever since her beloved father overdosed. Yes. That's the <i>most</i> developed.) Lawson and Cullen are more intermittently reliable -- Lawson has a particularly intense outburst -- though that may simply be because their characters operate so much in Grange's shadow that it's hard to see them as anything more than yes-men. And to the play's credit -- or perhaps director David Fofi's -- <i>Collision </i>doesn't back down from showing some of the things it talks about, with Grange talking Doe out of his bed and into roommate Bromley's, or with the various acts of violence. But none of this feels serious (despite the play's change in description from "dark comedy" to "drama"): in fact, the more these characters talk, especially once they're leaping childishly about with guns in their hands, the less real it all seems.<br />
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The last, nearly intolerable twenty minutes of <i>Collision </i>is <i>Fight Club </i>without any of the satire, without any of the bite; at least Tyler Durden knows what he's doing. Grange knows only that he <i>doesn't </i>know why he's doing this shit, says only -- in lieu of actual motivation -- that "a miss is as good as a mile." In that, it's like watching a headless dog chase its own tail -- and the use of mixed and confused metaphors is intentional, as opposed to much of the verbal meandering and claptrap of <i>Collision</i>.<br />
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So yes, there once was a critic stuck writing about an unpalatable play, but then he finished the review, moved on with his life, and lived happily ever after.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-24879815040624041332013-01-20T21:00:00.000-05:002013-01-20T22:24:08.739-05:00THEATER: It Could Happen to Anyone in "Bethany"Crystal (America Ferrara) would like you to buy a new car, preferably within the next week. Because that's when her Saturn dealership is shutting down. And she works on a straight commission. Which she needs in order to buy window guards for the foreclosed home that she's illegally living in. In order to prove to Toni (Myra Lucretia Taylor) that she's financially stable enough to regain custody of her daughter. The car, says Crystal, is like a second skin -- you can even sleep in it, as she knows from experience -- but the skin that playwright Laura Marks is pitching here in <i>Bethany</i> is a much tougher one. (Crystal is fragile, the character is not.) The thick skin you need to actually wrest down the American dream<i>. </i>There's a reason the powerful climax of <i>Bethany </i>is not in its confrontation, but in the cleaning-up that follows, a torturous albeit pine-scented affair, set to a final bit of "advice" from a manipulative motivational speaker Charlie (Ken Marks): "We all have the power to manifest our own reality."<br />
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The problem with reality is that we're not the only ones manifesting it, a fact that Crystal realizes when, after breaking into an abandoned home, she encounters Gary (Tobias Segal), a slightly unhinged fellow squatter. Moreover, it's hard enough to control our immediate surroundings: Crystal can truck in some furniture from the Salvation Army, stock the fridge with some basics, but that doesn't change any of the other identical dozens of abandoned houses on the block (artfully illustrated by set designer Lauren Helpern), or shelter her boss, Shannon (Emily Ackerman), from losing her job, too:<br />
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CRYSTAL: Did you talk to headquarters? Because all they have to do is find someone else to buy out the franchise, this is crazy--<br />
SHANNON: H.Q. doesn't give two shits about it. They're busy trying to sell the whole company.<br />
CRYSTAL: What? Who could they sell it to?<br />
SHANNON: I don't know. Japanese.</blockquote>
So much for the idea of "personal potential," yet another particularly bitter grain of salt from the mouth of Charlie; that salt grows even courser after his harried wife, Patricia (Kristin Griffith), provides more insight into his character, or lack thereof. (He's less interested in Crystal's knowledge of the car's "features" and more about the "benefits.") Even Gary's survivalist instincts essentially revolve around dropping off the grid entirely and running from the government; it's a more extreme version of declaring bankruptcy, of abandoning one's home. For all the talk about Crystal achieving her more-and-more impossible dream -- we learn that she was twice Saleswoman of the Year at her old Ford dealership and, better yet, see her skills in action as she hard sells Patricia in a move that would make David Mamet proud -- the truth is not that succeeding is impossible, but that <i>recognizing </i>that dream, or still wanting it after paying the very dear price necessary to earn it, is.<br />
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This price has been well paid by director Gaye Taylor Upchurch. By so starkly contrasting the pretty words of a motivational speaker with the uglier actions of a motivated individual, <i>Bethany </i>has about as much wiggle room as Crystal herself. Ferrera pays for this, too: she's stuck playing desperation, and her moments of hesitation, panic, or regret are all compacted into a binary form of acting. Forces act <i>upon</i> Ferrara and her character; they both spend the play reacting, within limited means, and there are few real surprises, given the stakes. This isn't a discredit to them, or to their style; they're true to the world that Marks has created, and this team evokes the desired emotions. But there's a difference between producing an effect and being effective; <i>Bethany </i>is too underwater to ever truly move from the former to the latter.<br />
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<b>Bethany (World Premiere)</b><br />
<b>by Laura Marks</b><br />
<b>directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch</b><br />
<b>produced by Women's Project Theater</b><br />
<b>January 11-February 17 (opened 1/20)</b>Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-85800462340288040392012-12-21T16:27:00.002-05:002012-12-21T16:30:13.717-05:00THEATER: The Surprisingly Heartwarming "P.S. Jones and the Frozen City"<div style="text-align: left;">
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Is there anything more important in the theater than confidence? Without it, Robert Askins could never have written his Obie-award winning <i>Hand to God </i>(in which a boy's Satanic sock puppet terrorizes a Christian bible group); without it, we'd never have seen his hyper-imaginative follow-up, the ode to old-school adventure comics (and perhaps a little Stephen King), <i>P.S. Jones and the Frozen City</i>. Without it, could you imagine Joe Paulik agreeing to walk around in a cape and goggles, smeared with the excrement that makes up his character's name, Pig Shit Jones? Or Sofia Jean Gomez trusting that Carla Bellisio's brilliant costuming and Eric Wright and the Puppet Kitchen's design could change her from a woman rolling around on an office chair into a Great Glass Spider, the menacingly sexy overlord of the titular Frozen City? (They're correct to trust: both actors come across brilliantly.)<br />
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Thankfully, there's no shell game going on in Askins's play: it's genuinely good. Jasons Simms' pop-art design (dotted storybook props that enhance Alex Koch's animated projections) sets the tone, E. Calvin Ahn's fight direction sells the idea of a giant's severed green fist going on a rampage, and Jose Zayas's direction has never felt so simultaneously loose and necessary, which is to say that while the actors appear to have freedom enough on stage for anything to happen, this is <i>not </i>actually a comic book, and so the action sequences and transitions must have been carefully planned out (albeit invisibly so). Few directors could so adroitly (and creatively) handle the call for an army of fire-breathing tigers, a cult of cannibalistic sirens (Jenny Seastone Stern and Diana Oh, putting the aces in menaces), and a spectral Gunslinger (Steven Rishard), to say nothing of Bobby Moreno's appearance as a befuddled giant named Lothar.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6FYNSkyJNS56dntPPSMTRpvP1N8AG2vQwTV7YmMBWXzD_MWPWdoGMa0R_UWGZND9tApH384VGnInc1cZMHSPUtT6OBbAakbvuq2wRQOrQl6SxC33kCoEo4yxkbMogAv4dF3bnHckZ99TW/s1600/P.S.+Jones+4-p.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6FYNSkyJNS56dntPPSMTRpvP1N8AG2vQwTV7YmMBWXzD_MWPWdoGMa0R_UWGZND9tApH384VGnInc1cZMHSPUtT6OBbAakbvuq2wRQOrQl6SxC33kCoEo4yxkbMogAv4dF3bnHckZ99TW/s400/P.S.+Jones+4-p.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photos/Jill Steinberg</i></td></tr>
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Astute readers will note that I've jumped around plot points -- that's because <i>P.S. Jones</i> basically operates as a highlight reel, in which Pig Shit, our hero, accidentally stumbles onto a Quest of Great Importance that separates him from his beloved (and shriveled puppet) mother (Gomez) and sends him on a collision course with Benjamin (Preston Martin), his flamboyantly well-spoken and well-dressed opposite (his brother, naturally). Following the trail of a severed limb and a phantom cowboy through one of the many inhospitable deserts of the post-apocalypse, it's less about the plot of the journey than the experiences along the way -- eye-catching and rib-tickling stuff, and budget-stretching design miracles that ought to get terraNOVA even more nominations at the yearly NYIT Awards. (Hell, I was even impressed by the fidelity of the sound effects from Jane Shaw and Emma Wilk.)<br />
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Confidence is what allows me to wholeheartedly recommend <i>P.S. Jones and the Frozen City</i>: you <i>will</i> enjoy, or at least be impressed by, this madcap theatrical adventure.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-62837829002711895662012-12-14T00:30:00.002-05:002012-12-14T00:30:31.603-05:00THEATER: Fine Animal Instincts Shown in "Volpone, or the Fox"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Carol Rosegg</i></td></tr>
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Greed, despite what you may have heard, isn't good. Comedies about greedy men, on the other hand are. And while Red Bull (every bit as energetic as the drink) is best known for its bloody, revenge-filled tragedies -- and this 1606 play of Ben Jonson's is known as a scathing satire -- the just desserts awarded to <i>Volpone</i>'s supposedly above-the-law Venician one-percenters are well within director Jesse Berger's and his company's wheelhouse. The web of deceit that Mosca (Cameron Folmar) spins to convince a trio of sycophantic noblemen to make regular gifts to his "dying" master, Volpone (Stephen Spinella), so that they might buy their way into becoming his heir, is a farcical delight, but the true pleasures come at watching these suitors -- lawyer Voltore (Rocco Sisto), the befuddled old Scrooge, Corbaccio (Alven Epstein); and preening merchant Corvino (Michael Mastro) -- devolve into their animal namesakes. (Sly foxes -- <i>volpone</i> -- often pretend to be dead, in the hopes of catching and killing their prey: vultures, ravens, and crows.) Given how entertainingly ridiculous it all gets, you might as well dub it <i>Bachelor: Venice 1607</i>.<br />
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Berger eschews any hint at subtlety (John Arnone's set consists of a few hand-drawn backdrops and a single, domineering death bed: realism this is not) and wisely has his characters lay it on thick, lest we feel sorry for any of them. Clint Ramos's costumes emphasize or exaggerate each character's nature -- note Volpone's absurd pajama cod-piece; see Voltore's dashing black and white-feathered cloak -- as do the wigs and hair design Charles LaPointe uses to tart up Volpone's idle pleasures: a eunuch named Castrone (Sean Patrick Doyle), a dwarf known as Nano (Teale Spearling), and a clown/hermaphrodite known as Androgyno (Alexander Sovronsky). As you can tell by the names, Jonson wasn't attempting to mask the decadent, idle rich: he was exposing them, in all their nefarious "glory." Though Volpone starts out simply thrusting himself at the various hidden compartments in his bed that hold gold coins, pearls, and other baubles, he's soon getting all rape-y toward Celia (Christina Pumariega), whose husband, Corvino, has basically pimped out with the threat of physical violence. These cartoonish fops, who begin as curious creeps, soon become all-out villains: money corrupts, absolutely, even in a comedy.<br />
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All that said, portions of <i>Volpone</i> are overstuffed and more than a little repetitive, and the female characters -- like the Fine Madam Would-Be (the game Tovah Feldshuh), who is attempting to seduce Vopone for his wealth -- are all unflatteringly underwritten, neither comic or dramatic: they're just objects. After catching its breath during the intermission, the second half slows down and takes its time moralizing before the Venetian courts, rather than simply allowing Mosca's machinations to implode. (In fact, there's a notable lull whenever Folmar is off-stage; his double-takes, asides, and quick wit are needed to give all that buffoonery a direction.) You can't blame Berger for his fidelity to the script, nor the actors for their over-the-top dedication to such intentionally shallow characters (Epstein and Mastro are standouts, though the entire cast is top-notch); perhaps it's simply that this revival of <i>Volpone </i>is a little <i>too</i> timely, with ninety-nine percent of the audience racing ahead of the play to the inevitable and satisfying ending. Still, even if this production were nothing more than a fox-trap (and as a rousting bit of theater, it <i>is</i> more), it's a well-crafted and oiled machine; you won't mind getting caught up for several hours.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-32167124570670646392012-12-07T00:25:00.004-05:002012-12-07T00:26:27.017-05:00THEATER: I Heart Theater at "Hearts Like Fists"Flux Theatre Ensemble @ The Secret Theatre<br />
44-02 23rd Street<br />
Long Island City, NY<br />
through December 15, 2012<br />
Running Time: 100 minutes (no intermission)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Isaiah Tanenbaum</i></td></tr>
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Is there such a thing as a romantimaniac? Or an rom-com action flick, the sort that's satisfying for boys and girls of all ages? Right now, it feels as if Adam Szymkowicz has cornered the market on shows that feature figuratively and literally broken hearts, the closest comparison being the work of Vampire Cowboy Theater, so if superheroes or slapstick-y romances are your thing, get thee to <i>Hearts Like Fists</i>. As a special bonus for those in the know, you'll also get to see Flux's bold artistic director August Schulenburg bravely (and successfully) taking on fight choreography in his wide-eyed and theatrical turn as the deranged and deformed Doctor X, who imagines that his victims would thank him for killing them in their love-entwined slumber, thereby preserving their happiness before it crumbles.<br />
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At the heart of this play of extremes is the tentative relationship between heart-stopping Lisa (a confident Marnie Schulenburg), who is paid to avoid construction sites lest she cause wolf-whistling men to fall to their death, and the fragile Peter (Chinaza Uche), whose good-natured heart has been broken so often that he's working overtime to craft an artificial replacement. Fearing rejection, Peter ends up bailing on Lisa -- who's never been abandoned before -- and this role-reversal leads to a complicated courtship, one that's filled with increasing danger once the purposeless Lisa joins up with a trio of female Crimefighters (Becky Byers, Rachael Hip-Flores, and Aja Houston) to thwart Doctor X's romantic murders. But Szymkowicz has grown from earlier, over-the-top stabs at such subject matter (<i>Nerve</i> springs to mind), and while there are still some exaggerated and underwhelming scenarios on the fringes of the play (one of the Crimefighters plans to rekindle her romance with the Commissioner [Chris Wight]; Susan Louise O'Connor plays a hysterical [in both senses] nurse who pines for one doctor while being lusted after by another), <i>Hearts Like Fists</i> works best when it takes its emotions seriously and allows the poetic writing to go for the laughs: "A big boat of depression just sailing over my chest"; "You're building a wall around your candy shell; you're afraid I might eat it!"<br />
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In one of the cleverer echoes of the play, Doctor X and Peter sound off about the joys of having an obsession: "I don't have to think while I'm working. I don't have to feel." Thanks to Kelly O'Donnell's consistent direction and Adam Swiderski's humorous and exhausting fight choreography, the cast of <i>Hearts Like Fists</i> doesn't have to think while working, though they're clearly more than able to feel, which is the beating strength of this production.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-72921941142508106542012-12-04T22:00:00.000-05:002012-12-04T22:00:06.310-05:00THEATER: I'll Be Home For "A Civil War Christmas"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYriSk3y7rtzrSoU1BubJb2CtZLhbivKWbLhzjtkzwqjOWQuoeRmk4PH7zZ0WXhogscljdymt5DmCWq9UGg1QFywrKqI4lFGKXMt0E7WAYNHwYWsDIeJyW1VSRCUgXnhMOrRUX-0zUoowB/s1600/CivilWarChristmas0010.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYriSk3y7rtzrSoU1BubJb2CtZLhbivKWbLhzjtkzwqjOWQuoeRmk4PH7zZ0WXhogscljdymt5DmCWq9UGg1QFywrKqI4lFGKXMt0E7WAYNHwYWsDIeJyW1VSRCUgXnhMOrRUX-0zUoowB/s640/CivilWarChristmas0010.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Carol Rosegg</i></td></tr>
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It's Christmas Eve, 1864, and Paula Vogel is shining a spotlight on three wise American men as they momentarily step back from the brink of their war and enjoy a moment of peace. Hark, a rueful Robert E. Lee (Sean Allan Krill) refuses, out of solidarity with his impoverished troops, to drink hot coffee or rest his bones! O, how General Ulysses S. Grant (Chris Henry) is prodded toward victory by his sobering aide-de-camp Ely Parker (Jonathan-David). Hear, of course, President Abraham Lincoln (Bob Stillman), in all his stove-piped glory, as he allows an enigmatic dream to worry its way under his skin. Now, forget about all these characters -- we're about to be introduced to at least a dozen more, and you'll not hear from Lee or Grant again -- because in this patchwork play, Vogel could care less about these potent historical figures. She's after that holy atmosphere found in those tales of Christmas miracles, and while she achieves it, that's no great achievement in itself: the thematic structure of "clever" conveniences, collusions, and collisions is made no less hokey by the educational setting of <i>A Civil War Christmas</i>.<br />
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With the utmost of respect for Vogel and her director, Tina Landau, <i>A Civil War Christmas </i>is a beautiful and occasionally touching tale, but it is also -- and more often -- hectic and manipulative nonsense, propelled by insistent and omniscient narrators and livened by carols. Alice Ripley, who does a fine, dare I say brave, job as Mary Todd Lincoln is at times made out to be a bipolar buffoon on the search for the perfect Christmas tree (when comic relief is called for), while at others provides a calm and somber entrance into a military hospital, where the dying soldiers call out for a mysterious figure who is half Walt Whitman, half Santa Claus. The play flits from interesting fact to interesting fact, all the while largely forgetting to <i>itself</i> be interesting, and the tonal imbalance and large gabs between individuals prevents any chords from standing out, let alone developing into anything close to a harmonious whole. In fact, when the entire cast sings a carol, it's difficult to determine where to even look: each character's doing their own abstract thing. There's a brief romance between a mule and a horse on opposite ends of the Potomac; there are moral reminders that some Union soldiers were Jewish, and had their own prayers and songs; there's a freeman out for vengeance on the confederates who kidnapped his wife: are we watching <i>War Horse</i>, <i>Lincoln</i>, or <i>Django Unchained</i>?<br />
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The few tatters of outstanding material in the play all use echoes to sustain themselves: with each stitch that Elizabeth Keckley (Karen Kandel) makes in a Christmas shawl, she is haunted by flashbacks of her dead son and her escape from slavery; Decatur Bronson (K. Todd Freeman) keeps using work to distract him from his phantasmal wife, which gives poignancy to the moment when we learn what her cryptic message means. Much like Keckley's stitching, then, these are scenes that build upon themselves and use repetition to stitch themselves more firmly into our minds. It's far harder to find significance in the misadventures of young Raz (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), who runs away from her snoring father to enlist in the Confederate army, or to feel much for the plight of the young, hypothermically hallucinating Jessa (Sumaya Bouhbal), who spends much of her time on stage smiling at would-be slave-catchers. They serve as objects for other characters to react to, or as set-up for some of the more intricate coincidences that result in Lincoln narrowly avoiding an ambush by John Wilkes Booth (Krill, who is outstandingly bombastic in this role) and in Jessa's reunion with her frantic mother, Hannah (Amber Iman, a terrific singer).<br />
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To one side of the New York Theater Workshop space, a multitude of hats and jackets dangle from hooks. To the other, there are black and white photographs of these characters, hung from long white strings. But it takes more than quick costume changes and basic dramaturgy to mount a play, especially when ambiguous and unclear choices keep emphasizing the fact that a play is being mounted before your eyes. Why bother with authentic costumes (and some distracting modern ones) when the stage is, for the most part, bare? Why keep adding characters to an already addled script -- like a pacifist Quaker -- if they're only there to provide someone <i>else</i> with a chance for exposition? All the props and photos in the world won't help with such choices, and despite some genuinely touching moments, <i>A Civil War Christmas </i>feels like a research paper that's still scrawled out on index cards.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-72984749785489148012012-11-17T00:08:00.005-05:002012-11-17T00:09:00.472-05:00THEATER: Performance Anxieties: Reviews of "The Performers" and "Barking Girl"<i>The Performers</i> is about adult industry stars and their large endowments, but the Broadway stage must be cold or something, because these outsize-stars are shriveling up under the lights. (The fact that the show is closing on Sunday has little to do with it, though that may explain why both Alicia Silverstone and Ari Graynor appeared to be losing their voices.) Only Henry Winkler, as the still-in-the-game-legend Chuck Wood, manages to make the jokes more than cheap. When he bellows "They give me the front row because I need the room . . . for my cock!" or makes blatant puns about his penis, you're made to understand that his pride's the one thing he has left. His young rival, Mandrew (Cheyenne Jackson), while being interviewed by an old high-school friend, Lee (Daniel Breaker), only has room to showcase his insecurities; likewise with Mandrew's wife, Peeps (Ari Graynor), whose entrance is a long tirade about her tit size.<br />
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This is the thrust of the play (pun intended, and there's not a low blow this show doesn't take -- pun again, intended), and so as Peeps worries that her old friend (and girl-on-girl co-star) Sundown LeMay (Jenni Barber) may be stealing Mandrew with her giant new knockers, Lee worries that his high-school sweetheart and fiancee Sara (Alicia Silverstone), who is meant to be an endearingly demure high-school math teacher, won't be happy with his lack of adventure, while she worries that, because he's literally a one-woman man, he won't be satisfied with her. Suffice it to say that they all come together (not literally, although the pun's still intended: do you get the groaning repetition yet?) in the cheesiest, shallowest, and most contrived of fashions. Peeps confides in Sara and suggests a<i> Freaky Friday</i> swap, Sara attempts to make Lee jealous by drunkenly falling all over Chuck Wood, Sundown LeMay offers Lee the Porn Star Experience (splits!), and none of this is farcical so much as sad, though adroitly performed by the majority of the cast.<br />
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There are genuine laughs in <i>The Performers</i> -- Mandrew attempting to prove his acting chops by reciting one of the monologues from <i>Precious</i>, for example, or Peeps's attempts to follow a teleprompter -- but very little else that doesn't feel plastic. The re-enactments of porn scenes (without any nudity) are awkward and unfunny (the plot of a blue film hardly needs to be spoofed, after all), the women are far too uniformly presented as dumb, and even Evan Cabnet's direction feels stilted, most notably during a cat-fight that breaks out during an awards ceremony. Consider, however, the way the play ends, with the moralizing line, "It's not your brain I want, it's your <i>(pause</i>)<i> </i>heart." This is meant to be a sweet surprise, but it's totally unearned. And while it may be a surprise that playwright David West Read at last avoids coming right out with the dick joke, it's only sweet in the sense (as Chuck Wood puts it) of a money shot that doesn't hit you in the eyes.<br />
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Susan Bernfield's <i>Barking Girl</i>, on the other hand, is a series of micro-scenes spanning the growth of Rae (Adina Taubman) over ten or so years, from her initial worry at what the child inside her may become (would it be like the out-of-control barking girl she sees at a museum?) to what the child itself eventually <i>is</i>: "You are so much like him. And so much like me." But the play is oddly devoid of action, and Pirronne Yousefzadeh's direction takes things a step further, in that the characters are almost always sitting down or standing still, as if they are locked within themselves. For Rae, this somewhat makes sense, but the result is that she's never allowed to change -- she's always tense, whether with her husband, Gil (Max Arnaud), sister Becca (Meg MacCary), or the Sexy Guy (Tom O'Keefe) who keeps flirting with her, only to be rebuffed by her sense of matriarchal responsibility.<br />
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Time flies, and it's hard to feel that we know <i>these </i>characters so much as the general ennui and dread that their scenarios represent: Rae worries that she's not the cool mother, gets frustrated at the projectile vomiting and the lack of a social life, doesn't know how to approach other mothers -- in fact, hates the term "mother" at all, in that it labels her. There are some fine musings, and serene, peaceful writing, but it really needs to be driven by more of a conflict or united by a tighter series of echoes. (The sparseness of the set may play a part in this: Two tin cans attached by a string are a great image, but they shouldn't be <i>the only</i> image.) As is, when Gil dies -- suddenly, and off-stage, with Rae alerted by phone -- it's hard to tell exactly what's happening. Neither of the two scenes addressing this take more than a minute or so (together), and such compression leaves the show with no room to breathe, let alone to scream or bark.<br />
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(One quick disclaimer: at the performance of <i>Barking Girl </i>that I attended, loud music from the accompanying space permeated the theater. This is problematic in of itself, but for a quiet and contemplative play like this, makes it difficult to focus. Subtleties may have been missed; emotions may have been muted. Having read through the script, I don't think it makes all that much of a difference, but it's certainly something that didn't <i>help</i>.)Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-82032237637384438212012-10-24T16:45:00.000-04:002012-10-24T16:45:35.466-04:00THEATER: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: A Review of "How to Break"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Benjamin Heller</i></td></tr>
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If <i>How to Break </i>were an actual hip-hop track, it would be defined by the solid chorus and rhythmic structure that bridges the dramatic beat(boxing) surrounding the cancer diagnosis and treatments of Ana (Amber Williams), a fiercely independent 18-year-old popper, and her in-hospital romance with Joel (Pedro Morillo), a brash and flirtatious DJ who refuses to be constrained by his sickle-cell. But it would also be weighed down by a contributing artist's silly and ultimately sloppy guest verse in which their street-wise and serious doctor, Aden (Dan Domingues), falls for the hospital's breezy and hippy-like artist-in-residence, Maddy (Roberta Burke). Although Aaron Jafferis is credited with the book and lyrics, he's had to tie those in with Adam Matta and Yako 440's live score (Yako 440 plays a nurse, layering in the sound from heartbeats to complex rhythms), Kwikstep and Rokafella's introductory choreography (light animation, popping, breaking), and Rebecca Hart's music (I'm assuming for the folksier, acoustic numbers that Maddy strums and sings). There are moments where this all shines under Christopher V. Edwards's direction, particularly in the piece's climax (thanks in large part to the unifying video design by Dave Tennent and Kate Freer), but the majority of <i>How to Break</i> is distractingly disjointed and, worse, artificial, a sad truth that's at serious odds with the play's underlying message to "be real."<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3_4E99J-hkLlBu3GZ0r3vYT-bgS3t-X7CBq4WC4RA2EvJqPxh56-ioIQnTpfUbM7raYlYL25XvxHJm6XrU7vEMjs7dnSTdQAAgG9iFse3Q1aFqxYyrIrS0Nz6lPss3FjaE2cGZAZOKnNB/s1600/3Pedro-Morillo-front-Dan-Domingues-by-BenjaminHeller-214x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3_4E99J-hkLlBu3GZ0r3vYT-bgS3t-X7CBq4WC4RA2EvJqPxh56-ioIQnTpfUbM7raYlYL25XvxHJm6XrU7vEMjs7dnSTdQAAgG9iFse3Q1aFqxYyrIrS0Nz6lPss3FjaE2cGZAZOKnNB/s400/3Pedro-Morillo-front-Dan-Domingues-by-BenjaminHeller-214x300.jpg" width="285" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Benjamin Heller</i></td></tr>
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That said, props to <i>How to Break </i>for remixing Emily Dickinson's "Hope is a thing with feathers" and for tapping into various forms of modern teen expression to deal, often honestly, with the way we cope with disease. It's always refreshing to watch pessimism and optimism throw down; I only wish it felt a little more free-styled, It'd be nice, too, if Jafferis didn't feel it necessary to have Aden and Madden repeat the arguments already made by Ana and Joel -- particularly in a ridiculous yoga-studio setting -- and if he were able to be a little less literal with the dancing. Early on, as Ana gets her diagnosis, we see her step outside her body to release her mental tension with some dance; most other places, Joel is merely demonstrating his positive thinking by spinning a few moves through the pain.<br />
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<i>How to Break </i>wants to be ill, not sickly -- and I'm afraid it's going to need a stronger prescription to do so.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-64524703748809458722012-10-19T00:36:00.000-04:002012-10-19T00:36:46.617-04:00THEATER: Time Enough At Last: A Review of the New York Neo-Futurists' "On the Future"<div>
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Thirty plays an hour. Two to twelve new plays a week. All year long. Even with a revolving ensemble, that's a daunting task for any theater company, especially a non-illusory one like the New York Neo-Futurists. So it makes sense that they'd take some time off to . . . wait, what's that? <i>On the Future</i> isn't a vacation, it's a terrific evening of six aggressively meditative, earnestly inquisitive, and/or ramblingly comic one-acts? (Up front confession: I had to step out of the theater for Meg Bashwiner's "The Magnificent Meg Sees All," which confronts her "psychic" great-grandmother with the question, "Do you think it's possible to be a fraud and still be a good person?" and concludes that life -- and the future -- is more about the little moments than the big ones. Sorry to have missed it.)<br />
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Here's an interesting fact. When you started reading this review, you were in the past. The sentence you're reading now takes place in the present, but before you finish it, it will have been in the future. This is the sort of logic gaming that playwrights Joey Rizzolo and Christopher Loar enjoy humorously tripping through, but the presentation between their two plays is miles apart and serves as a perfect example of the variety one finds in any given night with the New York Neo-Futurists. Rizzolo's "Tempus Umbra" uses a shadow-play format and a snappy, pattering dialogue to discuss existence and time-travel; Loar's "The Theoretical Physics of Procrastination," features three deadpan and dour (though there is a dance break) versions of Loar (two pre-recorded on the televisions rubbling the stage, all dubbed with a Robotic Hawking voice) discussing the "undeniable reality that this play has indeed already been written."</div>
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Of course, not everything always hits home. Adam Smith's "Box" gets points for establishing a creepy, crank-flashlight-powered atmosphere as he detoxes from his digital dependence in an electric-less future, but his conclusion about what really matters is perhaps a little too cute or twee -- a consequence, perhaps, of trying to distill deep thoughts into a fifteen-minute short. Likewise, there are some good jokes (and unbridled performances from the playwrights) in Daniel McCoy and Ricardo Gamboa's self-explanatorily titled "An Introduction to the Future of an Expanding Universe as Applicable to Queer Culture, Pop Culture, and Culture Club," but here's a campy theme that perhaps runs on a little <i>too</i> long. </div>
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Timing issues aside, <i>On the Future</i> still serves as an excellent showcase of the Neo-Futurist aesthetic, and proves that while it's possible they may someday run out of ideas -- in the future, anything is <i>possible</i> -- they're still scratching the aesthetic surface in the present. Even a piece like Eevin Hartsough's informative "(Y)Our IMMEDIATE Survival Strategy," which has shades of a bit from a previous show of theirs -- <i>(un)afraid --</i> has an entirely original (and clever) presentation, in the way it incorporates bits of fear-mongering TV clips from the past to warn us about the future. If you take Hartsough's word (and mine) for it, there are two things that are guaranteed about that future: In the future, something will happen. And if that something is you spending eighty minutes at <i>On the Future</i>, that'll be a good something.</div>
Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-12840611572823587022012-10-01T23:47:00.000-04:002012-10-02T03:50:57.429-04:00THEATER: Violence Is Hard to Understand, So Let's Be Vague and Comedic About It<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd5zqjcfRR7B0aGFWdrVYFPPEh2I6GvySR9e6iuLnvX9p5Uuqwsb0Ou4fOfL6o0Kt4jtSa_9QBpj4SbA9tGVe4Sqxr8-L9ACnDoGNDguBXyDa0d3jImrFMqe_XB9KZvQuYL80Mlj8U_2rK/s1600/IMG0305.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd5zqjcfRR7B0aGFWdrVYFPPEh2I6GvySR9e6iuLnvX9p5Uuqwsb0Ou4fOfL6o0Kt4jtSa_9QBpj4SbA9tGVe4Sqxr8-L9ACnDoGNDguBXyDa0d3jImrFMqe_XB9KZvQuYL80Mlj8U_2rK/s640/IMG0305.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"><i>Photo/<span style="background-color: white;">Sandra Coudert</span></i></span></td></tr>
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Writer/director Adam Rapp's latest play, <i><b>Through the Yellow Hour</b></i>, has once again transformed the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater: one enters through a narrow graffitied corridor as blue-bonneted women stamp zeroes onto your neck and solemnly tell you that "You have been accounted for." Passing through a curtain made of garbage bags, the interior is a bombed-out ruin: the stage's ceiling has caved in, the walls are stripped and rusty, and emergency bulbs are strung across the walls like a most decidedly unfestive series of Christmas lights. Percussive gunfire echoes through invisible surround-sound speakers; the sound of explosions shake through the floor's subwoofer. There is, incidentally, a body on stage, sprawled in a drug-induced stupor by the clawed leg of a bathtub.<br />
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We're at some point in the future, in what remains of Ellen's (Hani Furstenberg) Lower East Side apartment; if the stakes are not already set high enough by Andromache Chalfant's amazing set design and Christian Frederickson's haunting soundscape, the play begins with Ellen shooting an insane intruder (Brian Mendes) and leaving his corpse in the corner -- "He adds texture to the room," she jokes, grimly. And so long as Rapp remains vague about things, focused more on the micro -- day-to-day survival -- and less on the macro -- the potentially Muslim "Egg Heads" who attacked the United States with germs and proceeded to castrate the men -- these textures are more than evocative enough to carry us <i>Through the Yellow Hour</i>.<br />
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In the first of three scenes, Ellen, a former nurse, barters for the infant child of Maude (Danielle Slavick), and it's a heartbreaking introduction to the dire toughness both women have bottled up within them. They have each turned to self-medication and have bartered their sex as needed, and the line between the two -- if any -- seems arbitrarily defined by the fact that Ellen has a stash of drugs, supplies, and a half-functional weapon. In the equally effective second scene, Hakim (Alok Tewari), brings news of the death of Ellen's husband -- with whom he was tortured and castrated -- and we see the depths of her determination as she forces Hakim, at gunpoint, to provide every detail of their treatment, even as she retches, weeps, and collapses to the floor. In a Dilaudid-dosed dreamstate, time -- and reality -- slips away.<br />
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The third and final scene, however, is on far shakier territory, and exposes the dangers of having a vague plot, a drifting story, a "lost" world. The theme is clear: whereas Ellen originally clung to the idea of having the baby that she and her husband had not been able to (and now might never have the opportunity to) conceive, she can no longer stomach having a child on her own, and turns instead to angelically untouched visitors (Joanne Tucker and Matt Pilieci) from a eugenics-like farm that aims to rebreed and rebuild the world, trading them her baby for a fourteen-year-old boy. (By which I mean an innocent, still-functioning penis.) Beyond the fact that this is a screaming <i>deus ex machina</i> that violates the internal logic of the play, the scene itself lacks the human connection produced by the claustrophobic scenes that preceded it (the second scene takes place largely in the dark), and falls too easily into a benevolent poetry. It also calls far too much attention to the unfleshed Big Ideas of the play -- War, Hope, Survival -- and the fact that Rapp has nothing new to say about them.<br />
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The same can be said for Jon Kern's <i><b>Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them</b>, </i>which I didn't like any more when it was written by Christopher Durang and called <i>Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them</i>. (To be clear, they're different plays. Also, a slight disclaimer: I briefly worked alongside Jon Kern at a former job.) The play doesn't officially open until October 17th, so take some if not all of the following with a grain of salt, but this slapstick-y production, which asserts that its aim is to humanize its trio of terrorists -- young would-be-martyr Rahim (Utkarsh Ambudkar), embittered supporter Yalda (Nitya Vidyasagar), and the delusional brains of the operation, Qala (William Jackson Harper) -- never really manages to slow down enough to connect. Throw in their stoner neighbor, Jerome (Steven Boyer), who believes that he's finally found a purpose, and the whole thing is just a joke factory. Strong as the performances might be, Peter DeBuois's broad direction hasn't yet found a way to focus on the sweetness shared between Rahim and Yalda, nor has it managed to find a way to pave over the gaping plotholes required to keep Jerome onstage.<br />
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The problem with <i>Modern Terrorism </i>is that it attempts to be taken seriously -- which is a bit like expecting an episode in which Bart befriends an innocent boy whose parents are plotting to overload Springfield's nuclear reactor to actually <i>mean</i> something. (I bring this up because Kern now writes on the staff of <i>The Simpsons</i>). I'm a huge fan of William Jackson Harper; that his portrayal of Qala reeks so utterly of Wile E. Coyote seems more a failing of the script than the actor. (The same might be said of the shades of <i>Scooby-Doo</i>'s Shaggy in Boyer's role.) <i>The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity</i> used the buffoonery of professional wrestling to actually make a point; <i>Modern Terrorism </i>can't stop snickering at the sight of Rahim wearing a tightly-pinching underwear bomb, or at his cultural obsession with <i>Star Wars </i>-- at least, not long enough to give emotional weight to the fact that Yalda's innocent husband was accidentally blown up by an American missile, or that culture can just as easily unite as divide us.<br />
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It's not as if the play's final image -- two humans (nothing more, nothing less) huddled together, sharing a song through an iPod -- isn't an effective one. It's merely that, even with blood seriously splattered across a wall, it feels stale and unearned. We shouldn't just "get" the message of the play -- it should sneak up on us.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-61351787565845925342012-09-25T00:01:00.000-04:002012-09-25T00:01:00.437-04:00THEATER: Red Dog Howls<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHIlLsXdnezfKMZ-YuS2aqvTZzq30rfGhuzGp28NdYtsT9RKk4DKAdzGFOS3-6S6v0yEbRqH6f_FUe20uIfa8EhLMcQGhwqxqfJDIOrCOnGlEPRzLuUPl6gHSaVguzbj_vKC5eJbO6vJwk/s1600/RedDog032.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHIlLsXdnezfKMZ-YuS2aqvTZzq30rfGhuzGp28NdYtsT9RKk4DKAdzGFOS3-6S6v0yEbRqH6f_FUe20uIfa8EhLMcQGhwqxqfJDIOrCOnGlEPRzLuUPl6gHSaVguzbj_vKC5eJbO6vJwk/s640/RedDog032.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Joan Marcus</i></td></tr>
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The thing you need to know about <i>Red Dog Howls</i>, before you get frustrated or restless, is that Alexander Dinelaris is deliberately pacing his play in a fashion that will pay off, to spectacular results, by the finale. To that end, the bland narrative device through which Michael Kiriakos (Alfredo Narciso) addresses the audience -- often to repeat, foreshadow, or stress things you've just or are about to see -- can be forgiven. Likewise Dinelaris's insistence on cryptic exchanges between Michael and his so-underutilized-she-might-as-well-have-been-written-out-of-the-play wife, Gabriella (Florencia Lozano): it's the opposite of exposition. Here, characters dance, <i>Lost</i>-like, around things they would normally address by name -- the contents of a mysterious letter, a person's identity -- although, thankfully, never for very long. The point, ultimately, is that Michael is spending the play finding, after his father's death, a connection to his Armenian past that he never knew, thanks to his stumbling upon a believed-to-be-dead grandmother, Rose (Kathleen Chalfant).<br />
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And lo, Chalfant is amazing, a real treasure of the stage. Though she's playing a mysterious and heavily accented woman who insists on stitching strange names onto baby pillows, never eating in company, and trying to prepare her grandson mentally and physically for something horrific -- "You must be strong" -- she's at the same time almost always sympathetic and relateable, if not entirely understandable. Chalfant gets the best of both worlds in this character, too, for she inhabits the peculiar physicality of both this 91-year-old woman <i>and </i>her secret reservoir of strength, such that Rose can bring Michael to a stalemate when arm-wrestling him. Whether you want to call this a riddle wrapped in a nutshell or whatever, you can't keep your eyes off of her, you can't keep your heart from leaping out to her, and you can't stop listening to her -- even when, as the subject matter turns to the atrocities of the Armenian genocides, you might want to.<br />
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This <i>Howl</i> is not a Ginsburg-like explosion; it's a slow-burning keening that shifts from a growl to a wail to an all-too-intelligible guttural sound. And as it is a play both about identity and forgiveness, it more than earns both: despite a few early and only<i> perhaps</i> semi-flawed scenes (depending on your perspective), this is a production -- and a performance -- that will live screaming within you.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-70739571835729567412012-09-24T15:53:00.000-04:002012-09-24T15:53:26.155-04:00THEATER: Job<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqsA4ahFThFTdQww95FpTlK91rVFatscINkDBJoMmprRfoAXQm1KABXQXND89oGwg8mg4ZLb8DfurrZZerNzk3zGUVfm7oUuasJkGpLrICF6NO2v3KtxuXKzDwXVmuEOBy__nIpvKyZm8b/s1600/Job4_HunterCanning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqsA4ahFThFTdQww95FpTlK91rVFatscINkDBJoMmprRfoAXQm1KABXQXND89oGwg8mg4ZLb8DfurrZZerNzk3zGUVfm7oUuasJkGpLrICF6NO2v3KtxuXKzDwXVmuEOBy__nIpvKyZm8b/s640/Job4_HunterCanning.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Hunter Canning</i></td></tr>
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It doesn't feel particularly ambitious or adventurous of Thomas Bradshaw to adapt the biblical story of Job to the stage -- even the title, <i>Job</i>, is straightforward, and there's material excerpted straight from the New International Version of the Bible -- and yet it's certainly within his shock-theater wheelhouse, with each new deprivation graphically brought to life by director Benjamin H. Kamine in the Flea's intimate downstairs theater. If there's a somewhat paint-by-numbers-like approach to the material, which skips between Job's classically themed and God's contemporary, comic scenes, it's at least been painted with vibrant colors, thanks to a committed cast -- in particular a gleefully against-type "Uncle" Satan (Stephen Stout) and soulful Job (Sean McIntyre) -- and some clever staging, which includes not only Michael Wieser's compelling fight choreography but also Joya Powell's tribal dance sequences and Justin Tyme's dirt, bone, and blood makeup and special effects.<br />
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There's also an interesting effect in the way <i>Job</i> has been compressed into running a little under an hour while at the same time featuring expansive scenes of violence, as when Job's son Joshua (Jaspal Binning) strangles and then rapes his sister Rachel (Jennifer Tsay). (For an example of Bradshaw's "humor," note that two villagers later comment that this wasn't technically "rape," as Rachel was already dead at the time.) Given the story's use as a scared-straight parable about god's mercy and vengeance, I can tell you that Bradshaw's unyielding physical version seems far more effective than the page's limp warnings.<br />
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Still, while Bradshaw interjects a little modern humor and opinion into the proceedings, thanks largely to the conversations between a clearly flawed God (Ugo Chukwu) and his bickering children Jesus (Grant Harrison) and Dionysus (Eric Folks), the majority of the show is dominated by the sight of one man's suffering. <i>Job </i>succeeds, then, on its own merits, but that may be a Pyrrhic victory for downtown audiences looking for a little more depth and insight in their dramas.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-91646729720271508242012-09-11T13:33:00.003-04:002012-09-11T13:34:26.914-04:00THEATER: Mary BroomeFor my first review back after an unusually long "vacation," and for a show being produced by the normally wonderful Mint Theater Company, I wish I had more positive things to write. But this dull, uninspiring, and often muddled revival of 1911's <i>Mary Broome</i> should have been swept back into the closet it was buried in. The supposedly scandalous "upstairs/downstairs" relationship between feckless, prodigal Leonard Timbrell (Roderick Hill) and the except-for-this-one-instance-entirely-wholesome maid Mary Broome (Janie Brookshire) will be relevant only to those most die-hard <i>Downton Abbey</i> fans. Even then, playwright Allan Monkhouse's poorly sketched scenarios -- almost all of which leave the action offstage -- are more likely to bore than titillate, especially with their monotonous lessons on propriety, as blustered by Leonard's father, Edward (Graeme Malcolm), and the cloyingly snobbish (and heartless) portrayals of Leonard's siblings, Ada and Edgar (Katie Fabel and Rod Brogan), to say nothing of his soon-to-be sister-in-law, Sheila Ray (Julie Jesneck).<br />
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The insubstantial plot is only worsened by Jonathan Bank's direction, which races so quickly through each act (the entire production, with intermission, is well under two hours) that even the cast trips up on their arguments. Roger Hanna's blatant set makes little sense either: while the family portraits that limn the stage may fit the pomp and circumstance of the first two acts, the choice to reverse them in the third (just as the family has turned their back on Leonard, so have the people in the paintings) is a distractingly cheap joke, as the portraits have no place in Mary's shabby home. The same goes for the fourth and final act, which changes the pictures again: symbolic or not, it's a counterproductive embellishment, one that takes away from the gravity of Mary's loss. Monkhouse is already all over the place -- just look at the aimlessly comedic introduction of Mary's parents in Act III (Jill Tanner and the delightful understudy, Peter Cormican) -- Bank can't afford to <i>also </i>meander. </div>
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All this might hold up if at least the characters changed, but either the actors are incapable of shifting or the script itself (the more likely culprit) shortchanges them of any real growth. Roderick Hill's Leonard is a fast-talking, amoral rascal: he does a fine, albeit increasingly bland and irksome, job of it. Janie Brookshire's Mary, on the other hand, is all too accommodating, matter-of-factly marrying Leonard after his father makes him "do the right thing" by the pregnant maid ("Well, I want to marry <i>someone</i>"), just as calmly allowing him to run off and neglect their child, and ultimately not even blaming him for their child's death. Instead, she abruptly announces that she's taking off with a milkman: this is neither a drama nor a comedy, it's a theatrical checklist. Finally, there's Leonard's mother, Mrs. Timbrell (Kristin Griffith), whom Leonard keeps insisting is exactly like him -- a wild, rebellious creature. If only. <i>Mary Broome</i> is in dire need of a live wire; instead, it's stuck with stiff, dry broom thistles. </div>
Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-19554105940920770502012-06-21T22:57:00.000-04:002012-06-21T22:57:00.555-04:00THEATER: 3C<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKdl8-NqH4nJI9Z8-2g2e1P4MQ4yRXOLfBwmRjo54uZtmQ4EHFP6eTGT6uQEKzHnL8RhYZ5RSyg5kVO233KAsuMN2gFJcwkB28SA_t7VuTZipKBmCPcU3FUOwYmxS20MLVgmFUSZBuFS5y/s1600/3C060r.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKdl8-NqH4nJI9Z8-2g2e1P4MQ4yRXOLfBwmRjo54uZtmQ4EHFP6eTGT6uQEKzHnL8RhYZ5RSyg5kVO233KAsuMN2gFJcwkB28SA_t7VuTZipKBmCPcU3FUOwYmxS20MLVgmFUSZBuFS5y/s640/3C060r.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Joan Marcus</i></td></tr>
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Why are sitcoms so popular in America? Perhaps it's because nothing bad ever really seems to happen, at least nothing that can't be shrugged off and reset by the end of the episode. David Adjmi's intriguing remix of <i>Three's Company</i>, <i>3C</i>, takes the opposite approach: nothing good happens, and the powerful spate of laughter that serves as the climax of the show is quickly followed, and ultimately stifled, by a deadening silence. </div>
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The sitcom conventions are all there, most notably in the outlandish landlords<span style="background-color: white;">, mentally unbalanced Mrs. Wicker (Kate Buddeke) and horrifically racist Mr. Wicker (Bill Buell). But the thematic structure of the play can be summed up by its subversion: </span><span style="background-color: white;">a massive series of comic misunderstandings lead the fastidious florist Linda (Hannah Cabell) to first believe that their </span><i style="background-color: white;">Night at the Roxbury</i><span style="background-color: white;">-like neighbor Terry (Eddie Cahill) is sticking his dick in the nose of her ditsy, promiscuous roommate Connie (Anna Chlumsky) -- they're actually doing coke. ("How can I feel good when I have all of this white stuff coming out of my nostrils?") Her prudishness makes it difficult to explain this to her new roommate, </span><span style="background-color: white;">Brad (Jake Silbermann), which leads him to believe that she's figured out that he's <i>actually </i>gay -- not just pretend gay, to fool the landlords -- an issue that makes her condemnations -- "I'm sick, you're making me sick to my stomach" -- wound him even more. Likewise, when Connie comforts this former Vietnam soldier, trying to get him to confront his trauma, he mistakes her solidarity as a confession that <i>she's </i>a lesbian: "Just today I was with someone [at the beach]. It felt nice. I love getting all wet." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Jackson Gay does a terrific job of staging all the beats of this production: pratfalls for clumsy Brad ("Is there some sort of insupportable weight you're carrying?"), striking one-liners for Connie ("I just get lonely and needy. Boy, I hope I don't get raped!"), and a whole series of elaborate dance sequences choreographed by Deney Terrio that express the ways in which Linda attempts to get out of the body that she feels trapped in. Gay's also absolutely brutal and unrelenting in the pacing, so when Mr. Wicker abruptly starts masturbating an unwilling Linda, or when Terry's "faggot" teasing turns violent, the shifts are shocking, as if the characters in a Nickelodeon cartoon abruptly started acting as if they were in an HBO drama. The cast, without exception, is exceptional, with particular attention given to Cabell and Chlumsky, who get the lion's share of reversals and breakdowns. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">The best example of Adjimi's technique can be seen in a simple game called "Faces," which Brad and Linda play in an attempt to cheer each other up (or, more literally, to mask their true feelings). One person calls out an emotion, the other person displays it: elated, anxious. But whereas a sitcom might leave things at this level -- broad strokes of showing, not telling -- Adjimi digs deeper, demands more: carefree, with an undercurrent of fanaticism. These are things that shouldn't -- can't, really -- go together, and yet these contradictions are part of the all-too-human condition. Is it any surprise that Linda breaks down<i> </i>for real after attempting to convey "Anguish, with an undercurrent of sexiness"? That could just as easily be her life, or at least, it could be, if she only had the confidence to embrace her looks. </span></div>
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Don't dismiss <i>3C</i>, then, as being simple or silly, although it is, at times, both those things. If you like, you're welcome to try to laugh it all off -- surely we've come a long way since this 1978 setting -- but you'll most likely find, as these unlikely roommates do, that we're terrifyingly stuck in some ugly conventions and some uglier lies. Tune in, turn on, <i>don't </i>drop out.</div>Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-89257791885853513552012-06-20T12:53:00.002-04:002012-06-20T16:00:16.823-04:00THEATER: The Bad and the Better<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixcmDjuqYozGLGUY071bkMJ36vGE6vqh482ypPeSs3gXxvfWbPLJiXWhyzYKJoRMfgHMvVSopdO4ePAvTbCmJKUlQm5w2ZlnWykOWLFQSgq7WkHq60O8uCiAI2NI9VeYwUo7oxIbjcgtvf/s1600/Monica+Simoes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixcmDjuqYozGLGUY071bkMJ36vGE6vqh482ypPeSs3gXxvfWbPLJiXWhyzYKJoRMfgHMvVSopdO4ePAvTbCmJKUlQm5w2ZlnWykOWLFQSgq7WkHq60O8uCiAI2NI9VeYwUo7oxIbjcgtvf/s1600/Monica+Simoes.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Monica Simoes</i></td></tr>
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"I'll have like this different level thing going for me where like the revolutionaries are all sentimental lovers and they all die because of it. It'll really just be a story about <i>love </i>but it'll be somewhat disguised as a cautionary tale about the hypocrisies of extreme principles." So says Venus (David Nash), a man who once wrote a play about anarchists, "The Sad Singers on Stanton Street," and who now hopes to use the impressionable and irrepressible young Faye (Anna Stromberg) to help him gain entree (and authenticity) to her anarchist friends: organizers Justice (James Kautz) and Charity (Selene Beretta); hacker Scotty (Nick Lawson) and his peaceful, foreign lover Edmond (Chris Wharton); and the violent revolutionary Inez (Regina Blandon) and her punk-poseur beau Nino (Byron Anthony). Oh, adds Venus, he'll have to avoid guns ("Nobody likes gun death on stage") and large casts, since the only thing producers hate more than expensive blanks is a big cast.</div>
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As you can probably guess -- considering that Derek Ahonen, resident playwright of the Amoralists, is best known for his arrestingly good anarchist-lite family drama <i>The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side</i>, his comically exaggerated, somewhat cautionary tales of love (<i>Happy in the Poorhouse, Amerissiah</i>), and his epic-in-size casts -- Venus's speech is both a foreshadowing device and a tongue-in-cheek commentary. And like <i>The Bad and the Better </i>itself, it's filled with angst, layers, absurdity, and -- the beating heart beneath it all -- truth. If it's not exactly subtle, who cares: Ahonen's an angry, ambitious, and intense playwright, and you can't be explosive without being a bit messy, too. And, to be fair, the political machinations of the super-rich -- represented here by developer Zorn (Clyde Baldo) -- and legislative idiocy of our representatives -- seen here as the dodo-like Eugene Moretti (David Lanson), who's more concerned with comedy than policy -- aren't exactly subtle in the real world, either. </div>
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As <i>The Bad and the Better</i> continues, the stakes grow increasingly high (and almost implausibly interconnected, except that Ahonen's working in extremes): Venus is actually an undercover NYPD officer, looking to entrap the anarchists, and his girlfriend Matilda (Cassandra Paras), who runs a cop bar, isn't always understanding of his duties and absences. Venus's brother, <span style="background-color: white;">Ricky (William Apps), is a washed-up detective, whose nagging wife and teenager daughter (Judy Merrick and Sarah Roy) are driving him to have an affair with his all-too-pliable (and stalker-like) secretary, Miss Hollis (Sarah Lemp), all of which is distracting him from properly investigating a string of odd murder-suicides that may be connected to Zorn. And then there's Julio (Jordan Tisdale), a new cop who's obsessed with Rick's "legendary" killing of three robbers, even though their unloaded guns are what shunted to a remote detective position in the first place. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Given the scope, it's hard to say whether the play would be improved by trimming some of the excesses (a lengthy conversation between three oafish cops about how to keep a woman from cheating on you) or if those excesses <i>are</i> the play itself -- after all, as Eugene puts it in a campaign advertisement, we're all familiar with those movies that are so bad they become good. And, above all else, shouldn't a play about anarchists be, you know, a little chaotic? It's all at least presently nicely, with scenes layered atop other scenes both in the script and through resident designer Alfred Schatz's set, which conflates a bar, office, bookstore, and several alleyways into a singular space. But while Daniel Aukin manages to keep up the energy nicely (to the point where it appears he's been working with veteran Amoralists like Lemp and Lawson all along), a few too many scenes wind up veiled in darkness, something that worked in the more sedentary <i>4000</i> <i>Miles</i>, but less so in the hectic <i>The Bad and the Better</i>. Then again, the final image he works into the play is a good one: </span><span style="background-color: white;">the road for good, bad, and better intentions is paved with bodies, no?</span></div>
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<i>The Bad and the Better </i>is profane without quite being profound and too antic to ever feel authentic, but it's interesting, often uproarious, and always entertaining. Those lured in by the title or reputation of the company will not be disappointed.</div>Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-44495493297331789542012-06-18T01:19:00.000-04:002012-06-18T12:32:12.948-04:00THEATER: Sovereign<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLGDyXyvbRrNh8hQVGKIPHEUH2oa3YGgGW-JFdLXOl7T6k3Ittd8kM1a_aeLTAOJo65b8yd6g8BkJ2wgY_XIxbR39gHxoRlyi2s9Yy76TJV67WLADkM4cvykntI9S4AFkbih1Hvu55uTSb/s1600/Sovereign+featuring+Hanna+Cheek+&+Stephen+Heskett+Photo+credit+Deborah+Alexander.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="427" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLGDyXyvbRrNh8hQVGKIPHEUH2oa3YGgGW-JFdLXOl7T6k3Ittd8kM1a_aeLTAOJo65b8yd6g8BkJ2wgY_XIxbR39gHxoRlyi2s9Yy76TJV67WLADkM4cvykntI9S4AFkbih1Hvu55uTSb/s640/Sovereign+featuring+Hanna+Cheek+&+Stephen+Heskett+Photo+credit+Deborah+Alexander.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Photo/Deborah Alexander</i></td></tr>
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Rest assured, there are no Ewok-equivalents in <i>Sovereign</i>, the third and final part of Mac Rogers's epic work of science-fiction theater, The Honeycomb Trilogy. In fact, after twenty years of resistance against telepathic, communal, bug-like aliens, there's not a shred of "cuteness" left -- at least, not in Ronnie (Hanna Cheek), the once-rebellious teenager who saw her astronaut father deliberately transport clutches of eggs from Mars back to Earth and later fought against her bug-sympathizer brother, Abbie (Stephen Heskett), "winning" at the cost of fifty-one suicide bombers from each commune -- including her beloved Peck; pretty much the last person keeping her emotionally grounded. No, the action of <i>Sovereign </i>picks up in the Pyrrhic ashes: Ronnie's now the governor of her settlement, a idol worshiped and whispered about by the resistance, but as we see from her callous judgment of Budeen (C. L. Weatherstone), a dim-witted farmer who unknowingly breaks the law, <span style="background-color: white;">she's all but lost her compassion -- her humanity. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and having already tackled domestic (<i>Advance Man</i>) and action-packed (<i>Blast Radius</i>) dramas, Rogers now tracks the mental anguish of the war by setting up a courtroom drama. In the middle of the night, Ronnie's loyal soldiers, the besotted yet childish Wilkie (Neimah Djourabchi) and stoic veteran Sharp (Daryl Lathon), have finally captured Ronnie's traitorous brother, Abbie, leaving her with no choice but to try him for attempted genocide -- lest he be ripped to shreds by a mob-like community, an act that would trample all over their fragile, newly budding judicial system. Ronnie's ambitious underling, Zander (Matt Golden), takes up the prosecution; the defense is left to Tanya (Medina Senghore), an ardent idealist who represents everything that Ronnie has been forced to excise from herself, the sort of person who all too easily condemns the sometimes necessarily brutal decisions of others. Also along for the trial, as reminders of what's at stake, are Fee (Sara Thigpen), who lost her children under the alien occupation, and Claret (Erin Jerozal), a "skin" (i.e., alien mind trapped in a human body) who is currently carrying Abbie's child, and who now fears that these retributive humans will kill the last children of <i>her </i>race. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Imagine that: trying a human for genocide, even as you yourself prepare to extinguish an entire species -- and if there's one thing that Rogers excels at above all others, it's making us sympathetic to both sides. This is one point where the change in casting is particularly effective. With no disrespect to David Rosenblatt, his version of Abbie often came across as a bullied brat, lashing back against the world; Heskett (outstanding in this and last year's <i>Brain Explode!</i>), on the other hand, carries a haunted and hunted look in his eyes that balances his self-assured intelligence. When he proudly advocates his role in the invasion, it's clear that he truly doesn't see it as genocide, but rather as the necessary evolution of an all-accepting, violence-free new species. Heskett's disturbingly convincing, even in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- his Achilles-like arrogance. Equally compelling, however, is Cheek's portrayal of the emotionally scarred (and physically injured) Ronnie, a state-of-mind no doubt helped by her experiences in the demanding <i>Pumpkin Pie Show</i>. Whereas Ronnie's been the clear hero -- if by dubious methods -- of the previous shows, she's a more complex, fallen character now, and Cheek plays through her pain like a woman tethered together with barbed wire: she's all grim determination, with a precious few happy memories ("fingerblasting") to occasionally soften her up. </span><br />
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Given that this final installment has so much history behind it, it's no surprise that <i>Sovereign </i>is the strongest piece of the trilogy, as just as the children have matured, so have the other elements. Sandy Yalkin's set began as a once-tranquil Coral Gables home and was later transformed into a grimy, run-down pregnancy ward; it's now a combination of the two, for while it's brighter and cleaner -- the seat of Ronnie's power -- it's also dominated by a shrine to the fifty-one martyrs who took down the first hive, and filled with reminders of the arduous years -- like the reapers that remain stacked against the wall. Amanda Jenks's costumes are terrific, too: Ronnie's military garb strikes a compromise between the utility that she required during the war and the style that she misses from her childhood; Abbie's tattered clothes tell their own story, too. As for consistency, we have director Jordana Williams to thank for the way in which Claret's anthropological and diplomatic actions mirror those of Conor, the original "skin"; for keeping the potentially overly comic roles of Budeen and Wilkie entirely within reality; and for the exceptional scenes between the newly cast Ronnie and Abbie, who pick off bickering -- and reconciling -- exactly where they've left off.<br />
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The strength of <i>Sovereign</i>'s cast, the dedication of the crew, and proven talent of the playwright, are each reasons enough for me to highly recommend this show, even to newcomers. Throw in the fact that, buried within that harshness, there is still a great deal of genuine humor and hope, and I really must <i>insist</i> that you check out this production. Set phasers to stunning, and get your ticket today.Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5740282838839188438.post-51379048776950881102012-06-17T20:19:00.000-04:002012-06-18T03:02:55.935-04:00THEATER: Uncle VanyaI don't think Chekhov ever used the term "creep" to describe his characters, and yet that perfect word choice is one of the little joys that makes Annie Baker's adaptation of <i>Uncle Vanya</i> so enjoyable to watch. The ennui of this piece transcends time, and so under Sam Gold's more than capable direction, their production is transported -- or suspended -- into a carpeted, '70s-style den, with the cast clad in jeans and lumberjack shirts, unencumbered by accents or the exaggerated import that sometimes accompanies the melodramatic moments. Instead, Baker writes from a place of sincere desperation -- an act that has the ironic effect of extending the cruelest moments from the most bubbling: a conversation between new confidants Sonya (Merritt Wever) and her young stepmother, the enchanting Yelena (Maria Dizzia), that is shut down by selfish professor (Peter Friedman), or a drunken moment of abandon shared by the generally dour Astrov (Michael Shannon) and dwindling <span style="background-color: white;">Vanya (Reed Birney) that is defined by the fact that it will not be remembered. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">As for the one moment of romance that does occur -- after much hemming and hawing -- between Astrov and Yelena: it lasts scarcely for a second; it's a beautiful, tragic reversal on the "true love prevails" trope in which the woman flings herself into the man's arms, and all is well. No, the world of <i>Uncle Vanya </i>vacillates between Sonya's two mindsets: that "Truth, whatever it may be, is never as frightening as uncertainty" and that "Not knowing is better, because then at least you still have hope." Both are crushing, and if there's a single uplifting thought in this bleak play, it the observation Astrov makes: that at least we are <i>all</i> creeps, that the normal mode of human life is a tough one. </span><br />
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These observations, and more, are made even more accessible thanks to Gold's intimate in-the-round staging, an act that ensures you will be close enough at all times to hear the actual <i>labor </i>of an actor's breathing -- even in something as simple as sleep. It's important that we have these utterly unromanticized moments: Gold doesn't rush over a single action in the play, and along with the naturalistic Baker is absolutely comfortable with silence. These are the true heartbeats: Vanya's confession of suicidal despair is merely the dramatic embellishment on what has been there the whole time. <span style="background-color: white;">(This leaves the one lingering question regarding Andrew Lieberman's wood-framed set: why are the Russian letters for "Uncle Vanya" prominently set in the wall?)</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">There's a reason the final sequence takes so long, with characters departing one after another until only Vanya and Sonya are left working endlessly as the lights slowly dim. Sonya has already given her final speech about how unhappy people like them will go on and live, working without reward and enduring until they die so that they might </span><i style="background-color: white;">then</i><span style="background-color: white;"> rest. But let's not rush that: we must wait and endure so that we might </span><i style="background-color: white;">then </i><span style="background-color: white;">understand what it truly means to live.</span>Aaron Ricciohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05003634532469211190noreply@blogger.com0