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THEATER: Advance Man

2012-01-30T13:42:00.000-05:00

Photo/Deborah Alexander

Given that it recently closed after a brief run at the out-of-the-way, yet extremely charming, Secret Theater, you probably missed Mac Rogers's Advance Man. And ironically, though this review will ultimately recommend the show, it's probably for the best. You see, as the first part of "The Honeycomb Trilogy" trilogy (Parts II and III are due in early April and mid-June), Advance Man is stuck doing all of the groundwork for what promise to be more dynamic successors.

Even the plot is literally mired in gearing up for the future: Bill (Sean Williams) was the first man to walk on Mars three years ago, but quit being an astronaut so that he and his surviving crewmates -- bad boy Raf (Abraham Makany), good girl Belinda (Rebecca Comtois), and logical Valerie (Shaun Bennet Wilson) -- could better prepare their families for what they found there. The secrecy leads to some tension between Bill, his wife, Amelia (Kristen Vaughan), and his children: the artistic and soft son, Abbie (David Rosenblatt), and the tough and intelligent daughter, Ronnie (Becky Byers), especially after the interference of a private investigator (Amanda Duarte) forces them to accelerate their plans. There's also -- with some shades of the little-seen film The Astronaut's Wife -- the matter of what exactly happened to the once-vivacious Conor (Jason Howard), another member of Bill's crew, who has been so traumatized by the Mars voyage that he now lives with Bill, haltingly and hauntingly standing in his favorite corner, a bundle of nerves with a vocabulary of twenty or so words. (Shades of the little-seen film The Astronaut's Wife.)

It's a lot to digest, which is why it's for the best that most of the awkward "drama" that Rogers has cooked up to flavor this dry yet semi-necessary exposition seems fully out of the way by the end of Advance Man, paving the way for what seem like far more promising sequels. Sensitive Abbie won't have to spend all his time drawing pictures of aliens anymore, and rebellious Ronnie (the hero of this play, thanks especially to Byers's fiery presence) will hopefully find someone more suitable to snog than the creepy Raf. Nobody will have to justify themselves to Kip (Brian Silliman), a rich and literally star-struck investor in Bill's "environmental" development. Amelia will now have a genuine reason for conflict with her husband -- not just her fears of an affair (which she, admittedly, plays to the hilt). And most importantly, Conor, sidelined for so much of the play -- although in a way that still shows Jason Howard's terrific physical control (as in Rogers's last foray into science fiction, Universal Robots) -- may have the opportunity to take a more central role. Even if Rogers chooses to jump generations into the future, scrapping the characters he has only now honed, he'll at least be out of the slow, swampy mires of his Florida setting, and credibility won't be such a sticking point. (Unlikely as these particular astronauts are, their ability to smuggle samples out of NASA -- let alone to form a business using classified information -- is what's truly unbelievable.)

"The Honeycomb Trilogy" is ambitious, and perhaps Advance Man too often gets ahead of itself, but in response to its preparatory mantra -- "Are you ready for the future?" -- I find myself as excited for the uncertainty of what's to come as I am unaffected by the predictability of what's already happened.

THEATER: Leo

2012-01-16T17:53:00.004-05:00

Photo/Heiko Kalmbach

Presented by The Carol Tambor Theatrical Foundation as "The Best of Edinburgh Festival"

The wonderful thing about YouTube videos is that they tend to be short. They can present some innovative and creative concepts and then wander off while you're still marveling at the technique. Leo, on the other hand, is a sixty-minute play that doesn't overstay its welcome but ends up losing much of its charm. This solo, wordless bit of clowning revolves around one concept, and once it's exploited that, the play becomes a work of diminishing returns. Cool, but incomplete, particularly compared to some of other recent festival gems, like Paper Cut, Legs and All, or Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer.

Don't get me wrong, though: for a scattered twenty minutes here and there, Leo will positively delight and flip your world upside down -- or more literally, flip it ninety degrees. To the right of the theater, a man lies on the blue floor and leans his legs against the red wall; curiously, a lightbulb juts out from the left wall. On the left side, however, we see a projection of the same thing . . . only now, the man is leaning against a blue wall, with his legs on the red floor; the lightbulb now hangs properly from the ceiling. Using his physical strength, Tobias Wegner continues to sell the projected illusion; after a while, he begins to "cheat," dancing to Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola's choreography in a way that has him hurtling through the "air." Save for a reptitious middle, Daniel Briere's direction keeps building upon the concept, particularly as Wegner begins to chalk out a room of his own (along with a little help from animator Ingo Panke). Thanks to all the tricks, Wegner is literally able to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

And yet, without a story, Leo feels much like a tech demo for Heiko Kalmbach's video design (there are some nifty ghosting effects that blur the future and past) and an audition piece for Wegner (perhaps for Cirque?). You should still definitely see this production -- the whimsy alone is worth the price of admission -- but just know that what falls up still eventually goes down.

THEATER: Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and The Farewell Speech

2012-01-16T17:07:00.001-05:00

Photo/Julie Lemberger

Presented by the Chelfitsch Theater Company as a co-production of the Japan Society and Under the Radar Festival.

I first encountered the work of Toshiki Okada in the Play Company's 2010 production of Enjoy; the result, deftly translated down to the last tic by Aya Ogawa and finely directed by Dan Rothenberg, was a powerful and universal study of the lost twentysomething generation. This revival of his less mature and more stylized Air Conditioner, now part of a loosely connected triptych along with Hot Pepper and The Farewell Speech, which Okada directs (with English subtitles provided by Ogawa), comes across as a more indulgent affair. The plays are not without their power -- they're timely and perfect in capturing the helplessness of temps -- but their emphatic choreography overwhelms any sense of these being actual, empathetic characters: it's as if Pinter's pregnant pauses, Beckett's dry and hopeless repetitions, and Brecht's pointed alienation have all collided to much diminished effect.

For instance: one ends up asking why the Man in Air Conditioner is the only character to introduce his scene directly to the audience, rather than questioning the significance of his anecdote (how politicians tend to talk over people) and how it relates to his own casually brutal dismissals of the Woman who is increasingly flirty as she describes the frigidity of the office's air. It's not that there isn't a valid point being made by the three temps in Hot Pepper, who have been tasked with organizing the farewell party for their co-worker, Erika, so much as it is that the way this reflects upon their own eventual firings is overshadowed by their (I want to say Kabuki-like) overwrought movements. Congratulations: you've externalized their internal insecurities . . . then again, there's a reason they're usually internalized. Moreover, we don't really need three twenty minute plays illustrating the same thing; I was personally exhausted by the time The Farewell Speech -- a powerhouse monologue -- began.

This program claims that the pieces represent "the tension or gap between . . . gestures as acting . . . and physical movements that transpire in response to the background music." On some level, I can agree, in the sense that the text/choreography matches the jazz in its scatting, improvisational qualities. But it's meaningless to the majority of American audiences: their concentration will be too divided between the subtitles and the actors to pick up on much else . . . assuming it's even there.

THEATER: The Bee

2012-01-12T17:20:00.001-05:00

Photo/Julie Lemberger

The Bee is a co-production of the Japan Society and the Under the Radar Festival.

Mr. Ido (Kathryn Hunter) arrives home one day to find that his family has been taken hostage by an escaped murderer, Ogoro (Glyn Pritchard), whose only demand is that he be allowed to talk to his family. When the doddering detective Dodoyama (Clive Mendus) proves to be of no assistance, he tracks down Ogoro's wife (Hideki Noda) and son, and takes them hostage, refusing to let them go until his own family is released. What follows in The Bee is both a mad and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) dance, with the ridiculousness of violence on full display as Ido and Ogoro prove, as most humans will, that they are more similar than different. Further amplifying the effect is Miriam Buether's set, a non-judgmental glass house and its starkly mirrored walls, along with Hideki Noda's antic direction. (In addition to starring, Noda also co-wrote the show with Colin Teevan, based on a story by Yasutaka Tsutsui).

For the first half of the show, language and meaning are on trial, as the media and detectives provide their particular brands of illogic. The reporters insist that "People don't want reason, they want drama." As for the detectives, they are immature and sexist, and Dodoyama is a bureaucrat, through and through. He can only do the right thing if he's threatened, because a threat -- which is the wrong thing -- allows him to skirt his regular protocols, which are to do nothing. Double-talk, as you'd expect, comes up a lot:

DODYAMA: We shall resolve the situation before anyone is mailed or killed.
IDO: Maimed or killed?
DODOYAMA: Don't twist my words.
IDO: But you said maimed or killed.
DODOYAMA: I'm saying not to worry.
IDO: But you said maimed or killed.
DODOYAMA: I'm saying it won't come to that. Most probably.

By the more stylized second half, actions themselves are what come under the microscope. Ido and Ogoro are literally mirrored in several sequences, and what follows is a series of escalating and devolving cycles in which Ido proves his seriousness by mailing the fingers of Ogoro's son and wife to Ogoro, just as Ogoro does the same to Ido, until a point is reached at which Ido is, for all intents and purposes, cutting off his own son's fingers. And this routine, not so different from that of a ruthless salaryman, when you get right down to it, leads Ido to realize that he's not at all uncomfortable raping another man's wife -- in fact (and in verse!): "It only adds to my thrill, the thought that my own wife is, at this same time, most probably, being raped by Ogoro, against her will." The denouement is even more macabre: after running out of fingers, Ido steels himself to begin cutting off his own.

However, while the first half of The Bee coasts on wordplay, chaotic energy, and the absurdity of the premise, the second half, which is largely performed through devolving actions, makes its point so immediately that it's a bit tiresome to then sit through to the bitter end. Adding to this complication is the symmetry-breaking metaphor of a bee, which is trapped in the house with Ido, and which Ido fears above all else, as well as Ogoro's wife's inexplicable choice to remain a victim, though she has ample opportunity to escape and defend herself. It's one thing for her to be thrilled by this masculine stranger, for this stripper to not have to think for herself; it's another to allow Ido to kill her and her son. These psychological conditions exist, but because they're unexplored here, they distract from the central theme. (And we've already got the gender-swapping to distract us.) In other words, The Bee floats for so long that at times it fails to sting.

THEATER: Outside People

2012-01-11T18:45:00.000-05:00

Photo/Carol Rosegg

The well-meaning American is alive and kicking in Zayd Dohrn's Outside People, in which Malcolm (Matt Dellapina), the would-be vegan/Communist from Williamsburg, Brooklyn (who nonetheless boats a Stanford education), travels to Beijing, China, to visit (and potentially work for) his old college roommate, David (Nelson Lee), only to hook up with a local, Xiao Mei (Li Jun Li), whom he both wants to save and be saved by. His awkwardness isn't limited only by his feeble attempts to speak Mandarin, but also by his heightened self-awareness, which leads to a cringingly funny hotel-room encounter in which Malcolm is determined to confess to a half-dressed Mei that it's possible he might give her herpes. He's even further out of water in comparison to the bright, highly assertive, and quadrilingual Samanya (Sonequa Martin-Green), David's extremely well-rounded (in every sense) African girlfriend.

The question isn't whether or not Malcolm will fall in love with Mei, nor is it about whether he loves him or his passport: it's whether his sense of guilt will allow him to walk away with the girl, and the greatest strength going for Outside People is Dohrn's refusal to translate the complex emotions of love into black-and-white text. In fact, the play's strongest scene involves no English whatsoever -- no translations, either, although director Evan Cabnet's physical choices and tonal direction help one to follow along. In this scene, David drunkenly confronts Xiao Mei, either accusing her of manipulating his friend, or threatening her (as her superior -- class is the skirted-around centerpiece of this play). I can tell you that even with the script's translations in hand, it's impossible to tell how Mei really feels about Malcolm: like the term "shui bi," which is either an unspeakably impolite phrase or the way one says Sprite in Chinese, it's a matter of how one interprets the tone.

Malcolm's the worst sort of romantic (and I have some experience in this regard): he's the Xanax-popping, ultra-shy, unbelieving type, who literally cannot believe his own good fortune (to a fault). And while he's perhaps right to be suspicious of the job David's provided him with -- a do-nothing, high-paying role in which his whiteness is being exploited to provide the company with "face" -- it's absolutely toxic to the relationship he claims to want with Mei: "I don't want [to know] the best part. I want all of it. Everything." But one man's foul is another man's gold, and for Dohrn, Malcolm's tics and inhibitions make for a oil well of winning dialogue. Moreover, they reflect well on the entire cast, with Lee indomitably chewing through his scenes, Martin-Green providing the sharp, intellectual banter we expect of a play like this, and Li serving quietly serving her heart on a platter.

You can tell Outside People is a fully conceived work from its natural flow and complex actions, but moreover, from the way that it allows all four characters -- not just the star-crossed lovers -- to, at times, be the titular outsiders, trapped with the fear of never fully being known or recognized, of never having a home. But most importantly, you can tell Outside People is a good play because you'll still be arguing about it on the inside, too.

metaDRAMA: Not the YMCA, but the DMCA?

2012-01-11T17:33:00.002-05:00

Does anybody out there understand the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act)? I recently had a review of a show that I covered back in 2010 taken down off this site because it had in some way violated it (the DMCA), and I feel as if I've received no notice on how to actually go about rectifying my error -- if there was in fact one -- so that I might go ahead and re-post the (highly positive) review.

I've written before about my dislike of copyright acts in general, but now that I've had direct exposure to them as an independent writer who is outside of the mass media and therefore has no access to legal counsel or anything more than the flimsy and unhelpful FAQs and links provided upon receiving such a notice, I think I dislike them even more. I'm all in favor of checking piracy and preventing others from profiting directly from another person's work, but this is a site that runs no advertisements, makes no money, and, at worst, quotes only a few lines from a play -- and generally one in which I've been asked to review, as press. However, when we reach a point at which the organisms we set up to protect ourselves begin to encroach upon other people's speech, when these systems shut down the discussions they were originally established to protect, then we're at an issue.

I guess above all, I'm frustrated with how impersonal it all is. If I've made inaccurate statements in a review, playwrights, publicists, actors, directors, and even audience members are more than welcome to respond in comments or via e-mail, and I'm always willing to post an update or correction. Likewise, if photographers or playwrights think I've in some way misused their material, I'm more than willing to take something off the site if they simply contact me. The idea that you'd need to go to a third-party, to legally threaten and intimidate through a document which, mind you, I haven't even been able to see (since it goes directly to Google, I assume) . . . well, that just seems silly.

If anybody else is out there in a similar situation, or has found themselves treading this water in the past, I'd appreciate any information you can pass along. Mind you -- I'm not in any actual trouble; as I said, the post has been automatically removed from the site, and I'm entitled to repost it if I remove the offending sections (never mind that I haven't been told what those are). This is more about the principle of thing; what happens if more of my reviews are suddenly and inexplicably taken down? What happens if this post is removed? We take our ability to blog and upload to the web as a given these days, especially me, as I've been doing this for seven years now, so I guess I'd just like a little more information.

Cheers!

THEATER: How the World Began

2012-01-08T14:00:00.001-05:00

Photo/Carol Rosegg

How the World Began is a frustrating play, both intentionally and unintentionally so. The central premise, quickly revealed, is that Susan Pierce (Heidi Schreck), a teacher-in-training who has moved to a school still being rebuilt in tornado-afflicted Kansas, has inadvertently let some of her snarky East Coast habits sneak into her biology lectures. As one of her students, the bright and traumatized Micah Staab (Justin Kruger), points out, whether it's scientifically true or not, it's not right to imply that other theories of evolution are "gobbledy gook."

This is the intentionally frustrating part, for as the five-months-pregnant Susan admits to Micah's unofficial guardian, the easy-going and rationally religious Gene Dinkel (Adam LeFevre), she's both not good on the defensive and has no way to get through to someone with such ardent beliefs. What follows, with moments of tenderness interspersed within, is the unintentional part, for the result is an unambiguous ninety minutes of religious debate in which playwright Catherine Trieschmann's only real accomplishment is in giving each of the characters the moral high ground at one point or another. Her previous play with Women's Project, crooked, used original characters and circumstances to throw us off our own firm beliefs, but we've seen people like Susan, Micah, and Gene before.

Like the equally one-note Other Desert Cities, then, How the World Began struggles to rise above being a repetitious argument centered on a misunderstanding. No matter how well-written, how realistic, how witty, it boils down to a verbal standoff, and there's only so much the talented director Daniella Topol can do without something big actually happening on stage. (The escalations occur off-stage, and are only vaguely implied by, say, transitional lighting cues.) Schreck does a fine job selling us on her intensifying stress, especially after a gorilla-masked scarecrow is burnt on her lawn, but this also makes it seem as if she's the only character with anything at stake. And while Trieschmann implies that Micah's need for a public apology is grounded in his recent history -- his mother and step-father were killed in the same storm that destroyed the school -- she also holds back so much that it's difficult for Kruger to play the role as anything less than a cipher.

The final scene -- the final moment, actually -- hints at the better play How the World Began is capable of being, as Susan once again helps to sooth Micah's internal storm ("Just breathe...'til there's nothing left inside you but breath and heartbeat"). As the lights dim, on the two of them, she feels her baby kick. Micah reaches out to feel, only to have his hand slapped away: "Don't you dare." It's the first moment of real surprise, a play on the earlier suggestion that despite our beliefs, we're all human, and therefore all connected.

FILM: War Horse

2011-12-21T01:42:00.000-05:00

[Note: War Horse releases in theaters on 12/25. It's the perfect holiday film, notwithstanding the graphic war-scenes, so you might consider buying your tickets now, especially if you liked the stage version, which this one-ups in just about every way possible.]

I felt as if I was one of the few people to find the Lincoln Center production of War Horse to be overhyped: never able to forget that I was watching elegant and impressive puppets, even at the moments of greatest drama, the constant thought racing through my mind was, "This would make a mighty impressive movie." I feel vindicated now, having caught a screening of Steven Spielberg's adaptation of War Horse: there's a scope in the war scenes (comparable to those of Saving Private Ryan, although there's nary a splotch of blood in this PG-13 family film) and a tenderness in the close-up focus on the reflection of a little girl in a horse's eye that the play cannot achieve.

At the same time, however, the novel (which was originally in the first-person perspective of the horse) is less well-adapted by screenwriters Richard Curtis and Lee Hall than by playwright Nick Stafford. For one, Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) and his horse, Joey, now seem more star-crossed than ever: the film opens with lush, long shots of the green Devon landscape (which will later be contrasted with the tight, muddy grey ones of a war-torn France), as Albert watches the miracle of life: Joey's birth. When Albert's father, Ted (Peter Mullan), picks him up at auction, however, it's because his landlord (David Thewlis) is bidding for him, a rivalry that makes far less sense than the play's choice to make this his successful brother, the one who chose not to fight in the Boer War that has turned Ted into such a bitter drunk, love of his wife Rose (Emily Watson) aside. Likewise, when Joey's sold off to the British military at the start of World War I, it's not as much of a betrayal from father to son as it is a necessity of repaying a mortgage.

These changes make the opening "act" less tight, just as the scenes in France sometimes wander too aimlessly over the bizarre chances in which both Joey and his "friend," the black stallion Charcoal (inexplicably renamed from Topthorn in the book and play), dodge disaster time and again. It's nice to see the variety of people affected by war -- the dashing British commanders who are out-thought by their "crude" German rivals, the German brothers who desert in order to fulfill an oath to their family, the fragile French girl and her doting grandfather who are glad to have a moment of brightness in their occupied life -- but this isn't the film for it. The focus is best left on Albert, Joey, and the horrendous things that happen around them: Spielberg is too happy to trot about the scenery, though he's best at a brisker pace.

Just look at those "brisk" and agonizingly terrific final forty minutes. They're full of holiday miracles and tear-jerking presents in which Joey drags artillery, faces down a tank, and deals with barbed wire, while Albert -- who, in a smart although obvious edit from the screenwriters, has enlisted since we last saw him four years ago -- finds himself facing the other end of that artillery, the dangerous trenches, and the deadly gas warfare. It's more visceral than the theatrical production, and the stakes are higher, and yet the emotions are the same, which speaks well to the humanizing effects from the play's Handspring Puppet Company. Still, it's Spielberg's production that wins out: some horrors are impossible to imagine, and the realism of the film's war scenes -- fields scattered with the corpses of horses and their riders, bones shattering under the stress of such constant toil -- makes it unnecessary to imagine, only difficult to watch.

I don't imagine it will be possible to overhype this production of War Horse, a shoo-in for Academy nominations in all categories except those for acting (and that's no offense to Irvine, Mullan, the excellent Watson, and spot-on villain Thewlis, but this isn't really about them). Striking both visually and emotionally, and with only a few issues with pacing along the way, it's a great achievement (especially for an adaptation) for Spielberg, whose inclusive scope even manages to find a comic place for a belligerent duck.

THEATER: Bonnie & Clyde

2011-12-08T14:08:00.001-05:00

Photo/Nathan Johnson

In 1934, after a two-year crime spree that painted the star-crossed bandits as revolutionary heroes in a depressed America, Bonnie and Clyde are violently gunned down in their "death car." That's the legend; but that's not Bonnie & Clyde, the new musical from Frank Wildhorn (music), Don Black (lyrics), and Ivan Menchell (book). Sure, their deaths, in a flash of strobe lights, are a part of the show, but they're up at the front, pushed out of the way in favor for a poetic look at the Americana behind the myth. It's a little funny that the first number, "Picture Show," set in 1920, is all about Bonnie's desire to be like Clara Bow and Clyde's affection for Billy the Kid, given that the musical is far from the glamour both of films of that era, and of the 1967 classic, Bonnie and Clyde, and yet it's not surprising: born into lean times, with absent or hardscrabble parents, is it any wonder that escapism was on their mind? (Act II's opening will suggest the same, with the folk-like "Made In America.")

The musical is full of winning contrasts, particularly in the musical's tendency for unlikely duets that are sung by rivals, often across great distances, and yet about similar themes. Outlaw Clyde (Jeremy Jordan) and heroic cop Ted (Louis Hobson) both pine for Bonnie (Laura Osnes), and so they sing "You Can Do Better Than Him." Blanche (a terrifically wry and religious Melissa Van Der Schyff), is set up to be Bonnie's opposite -- in an early comic number, "You're Goin' Back to Jail," she convinces her husband (and Clyde's brother) Buck (Claybourne Elder) to turn himself in, whereas Bonnie ends up breaking Clyde out -- and yet both she and Bonnie sing from the heart that "You Love Who You Love." There's no shortage of tortuous solos, either, with Clyde, sexually abused in prison and abandoned by the carefree guards, turning to murder in the wailing song "Raise A Little Hell": if that's his only option ("I sure won't get to heaven"), and it sure seems to be, then why not? ("Freedom's something I gotta steal" is his mantra.)

These contrasts are further enhanced by Jeff Calhoun's wonderful direction, which handles some rather graphic and gritty violence -- these were murderers, after all, whether they intended to be or not -- in imaginative ways. At the moment of greatest chaos, a bloody shoot-out, the action literally freezes, with Clyde turning to his younger self (Talon Ackerman) to warn him about the way things'll be, before brutally jumping back into the fray as he murders a sheriff. Watch, too, the echoes in the reprisals: "God's Arms Are Always Open" plays with a baptism the first time around, and with a burial the second, both staged in similar ways; although "Picture Show" is still sung by the young versions of our "heroes" when it repeats, it manages to carry the weight of their grown-up reality; and "Dyin' Ain't So Bad" is a killer number both times -- at first, it's just Osnos singing through tears, but then she's joined by Jordan as the two ride off to their final destination, a sweet moment between lovers who can at least know that they've had some good time together.

Now, the play does have some flaws: the writing is all-around a little too literal for Calhoun's visual flair, Bonnie's prided poetry, and Clyde's basic skills with the guitar. The music is so heavy on up-beat pop/country that it sometimes doesn't match the mood, as in "Too Late To Turn Back Now." And some of the work just feels slight: "How 'Bout a Dance" is flirty and nothing more, and "When I Drive" is an unnecessary reminder of how boyish the Barrow brothers are. I sometimes wished the musical were a little more wild -- that the slap Bonnie and Clyde give one another didn't seem so staged, that the live projections on the wall weren't so on-the-nose about the "accuracy" of the musical. At the same time, however, I found myself wanting their ride to continue, hoping that they'd find some way to pull through: perhaps Bonnie & Clyde, in these days of the 99%, will.

THEATER: Maple and Vine

2011-12-07T23:13:00.000-05:00

Nostalgia can be a crippling thing, which sends people who are afraid of the future hurdling back into the safety and comfort of the past. But it's served the young and talented Jordan Harrison well, for he writes of times that he never knew, pulling lessons out of the '60s (Doris to Darlene), '40's (Amazons and Their Men), and '20s (Act a Lady) to help inform the present, to give a context to where we are. Even Futura, which was set in a dystopic future, centered around those brave few souls who remembered the days of paper. His latest, Maple and Vine, walks that same ground, as an unhappy Katha (Marin Ireland) convinces her husband, Ryu (Peter Kim), to move to the SDO (Society of Dynamic Obsolescence), a gated community in which every day re-enacts the values, attitudes, and lifestyles of 1955 America. If the slow food movement is about limiting one's ecological footprint, then this is slow mood movement, which aims to give one freedom in the bustling world by limiting their choices and reverting to a simpler time.

Of course, the 50's weren't a simpler time: they were simply more repressed. This works for Dean (Trent Dawson), a gay man who gets off on his guilt, the sort to sharply fill out a suit, patter glibly, and rendezvous with his boyfriend, Roger (Pedro Pascal), for some rough and secret sex. It's an interesting dynamic, the idea that the freedom to be gay might actually be difficult for a select few, and it allows Harrison to fully explore the dimensions of his '50s paradise, particularly in the "mixed marriage" of Katha and Ryu (only a decade after the internment camps and reparations) and the character of Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), whose prim attitude wasn't serving her in the real world, but who is built manipulate with the hidden powers of her apron strings and talent for gossip. Harrison suggests that there's a place, a role, or a character for all of us -- just not necessarily in a global culture as all-inclusive as today's. After all, if everything is permitted, is anything true?

Anne Kauffman, who has handled realist, surrealist, and surreal realist plays (The Thugs, God's Ear, Sixty Miles to Silver Lake), is a perfect fit for Harrison's material: she's visually distinct enough for the short scenes, quick cuts, and montages, and knows exactly how to stage dream sequences, in which Katha's new paradise is haunted by echoes from her old publishing job. If there's a flaw, it's that Alexander Dodge's scenic design doesn't better distinguish between the present and past -- sets from both times are wheeled about (or elevated in) in little dioramic frames (good for cubicles, bad for the "freedom" of the '50s), and a steel-rimmed modernity hangs both above the set (a triangle that represents the roof) and in a long staircase off the stage-right wing.

In terms of decor and tone, however, Maple and Vine does a fabulous job, and there's genuine growth from the hesitant and skeptical views of this society (a major faux pas comes not from aggressively playing charades, but from accidentally pouring Grey Goose) to the actual happiness shown within. Katha, depressed over the miscarriage of her child, finds herself embracing pregnancy again, and even goes so far as to suggest (at the local "authenticity meetings") that her neighbors actually be a little less accepting (and more suspicious) of her and her foreign husband. A little controlled adversity can help a relationship grow; you'd also be surprised at the fulfillment Ryu, a plastic surgeon, gets in his new job as a box maker.

I can't speak to life in the '50s, but given how many electronic distractions there are, Harrison makes a valid argument toward people being more present in the past. It's a clear and potent argument, thanks to the extremely present cast -- some of whom get rather close to those of us in the aisles. There are some real standouts, too, like Ireland (who plays instability better than anyone else), Serralles (steely, but not inflexibly or unemotionally so), and Pascal, who flickers not only between tough-guy floor manager and tortured gay lover but also doubles as Katha's comically Queer Eye-like coworker in the "modern" world. Maple and Vine illustrates a "simpler" time without sacrificing complexity, reminds us that we're all "playing" characters of some sort or another, and succeeds in proving that less can absolutely be more.

metaDRAMA: Computers Killing Critics?

2011-12-06T01:35:00.000-05:00

I had the recent opportunity to speak with a director regarding the clash between the poor critical reception of the show and what appeared to be much warmer responses from the audience. I understood the director's frustration -- that's why I started blogging, freelancing, and aggregating for StageGrade: so as to help widen a discussion about theater that is often dominated, sometimes unfortunately so, by the so-called 1% (it's actually far, far, less) of critics who get paid on a regular basis to weigh in on the merits of a show.

Like this director, I actively disagree with some of the major critics out there, particularly when I feel they've misinterpreted a show (like Milk Like Sugar) because they come from a different background and don't "get" or aren't able to "engage" with the work, or when they fill up an allotted number of words speaking about things tangential to the production, like the book or film that preceded it, the previous work of the actors or playwright, etc. (Not that this information is necessarily bad; I just feel it shouldn't dominate and skew the conversation.) However, unlike this perhaps righteously wounded director, I also think that criticism is important, and that this director's dream of direct-response, in which audiences might reductively give each show a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" that would help to inform other paying theatergoers -- in other words, People Just Like Them (the 99%, to continue that popular metaphor) -- what the real story was. I'm assuming here that the implication is that critics often get things wrong, and that even when they praise a show that the audience isn't investing in (like Journey's End, the early closing of which pains me to this day), they should shut up and let the market do its dirty work.

The biggest problem with this, for the record, is that people in a theater are not Just Like Them -- particularly on Broadway. For a 40-seat theater that produces risque work, it might help to know how the immediate audience felt: they know what they're getting into. But the larger the house, the more varied the audience, and the more difficult it is to quantify the results of stripping their thoughts into an American Idol-style vote (and it should be noted that American Idol was originally watched, in part, for its critics -- particularly the foul-mouthed ones). "Thumbs up" and "thumbs down" doesn't actually tell you what people liked about the show, so as to help you with the next production you work on, nor does it help to recognize actors (which might help them to get work in the future), and might lead to bad plays being produced more frequently, as there'd be no way to direct that "thumbs up" at the star, or the director, or the costumes, etc. On the flip side, a good play that's poorly mounted in its debut, or which finds the wrong audience might be doomed forever. Now, I'm not saying that a critic is going to be more accurate -- but they're going to be more descriptive, and that critic is going to have a body of work behind them that allows the various producers, directors, and audiences to decide how much of their review seems trustworthy.

Another problem is that this would lead even faster to the proliferation of "easy" shows, "light" entertainment in the theater, and work that's more "simply" marketed. There's already a ton of tourist-friendly pap flung up on the boards each year ("holiday" shows, I'm looking at you), and critics are already largely ignored when it comes to certain mega-spectacles (Spider-Man); while it may be more profitable, would it be healthier for the theater if everybody suddenly shied away from the harder sells, knowing that they'd no longer be able to lure people in on the merits of the work? (Ironically, this director spoke about how nobody working on a show was in it for the money, while simultaneously pushing for a way to make more money.) In the same sense that sports can be heightened by an understanding and appreciation of rivalries, histories, and statistics, so too can theater be strengthened by a fuller, livelier debate of the ideas expressed within.

The final, largest problem, is that simply looking at percentages of likes and dislikes doesn't help you to find the sort of show you're interested in. Do you buy a ticket to a show simply because it's 100% rated? No more than you buy things on Amazon simply because they're closest to five-stars: you go because something about the production speaks to you. Hopefully, in a good review (and there are some stinkers out there, I'm guilty of some myself) the critic's description helps to describe it to you, or can be purposed to work like the Netflix algorithm, in which how closely you agree with past reviews helps to recommend new shows. Direct democracy doesn't seem to have been all that great for California -- do we really want that in theaters? (Also, not to be skeptical or anything, but such a system would no doubt feature a lot of ballot stuffing, right? Assuming you could even get apathetic audiences to talk back?)

Ultimately, I was glad for this discussion with the director, however seriously intended it was (raw emotions and hard alcohol sometimes lead to faulty conclusions). I'm not the hugest fan of the system we have, but I'm convinced that doing away with it entirely is not the right solution. To me, the real trick would be in getting audiences to more actively speak out in dialogue with the critics, and making sure that there's a way to aggregate those thoughts right along with the reviews. (Again, I'm biased here, but StageGrade is the only thing that even comes close to doing this.) One voice is too tyrannical, every voice is too anarchic. I've written before about the wisdom of crowds, but it's a wisdom that comes only through moderation. Let's find the best way to talk about theater; after all, as you can see, my own voice alone is more a rant than a solution.

THEATER: The Cherry Orchard

2011-12-05T13:56:00.001-05:00

If you're a profound optimist like Pischik (Ken Cheeseman), the sort of man who rests so easy in the knowledge that everything will somehow work itself out that he's practically a narcoleptic, you'll likely find Classic Stage Company's latest revival of The Cherry Orchard to be, in his uninformed words, "Amazing, amazing." Look at the pretty, star-studded cast! Hear the clean, accessible translation of John Christopher Jones! There's little room, however, for optimism in Chekhov, and while Pischik manages to stumble into a quiet sort of success, Andrei Belgrader (who similarly under-directed Endgame several years ago at BAM, also with John Turturro and Alvin Epstein) simply stumbles, time and time again.

For a drama that's so much about the characters -- the plot revolves around a single action, the upcoming sale of the family's debt-ridden estate -- Belgrader largely ignores them, leaving them to their own devices, and in the case of Turturro, their own bad habits. Instead, he puts up a showy veil around the three-sided stage; has Santo Loquasto wash out the circular set in eye-straining white that belies the manor's former opulence (and looks particularly bad in the "outdoor" second act); and, in an act of token minimalism, leaves only the furniture directly mentioned in the script -- a dresser here, a trunk and a mirror there. These scenic choices clash thematically with the object-centered theme of the play, but for real evidence that Belgrader doesn't really know what he's doing, one need only watch as Charlotta (Roberta Maxwell) cheerily breaks the fourth wall, chatting up and dancing with members of the audience -- and not just in the third act's party scene, which features a variety of divertissments intended to heighten the tension felt by Ranevskaya (Dianne Wiest), as she awaits the results of the auction of her family home -- but during the relatively private second act, too.

The production's clumsier than Epikhodov, which is ironic, since the cast is by and large the one good thing here. I suspect it's largely to do with the experience of these stage and screen veterans, who know how to infuse their characters with more than the seemingly scant directions of Belgrader. In the particular example of Epikhodov, Michael Urie comes in already having mastered pratfalls, so he's able to concentrate on the otherwise undeveloped nuances of his scenes with the self-defined "fragile flower" Dunyasha (Elisabeth Waterston), and his new bad-boy rival, the boorish footman Yasha (Slate Holmgren). The same can be said, however, of Josh Hamliton, who makes the "perpetual student" Trofimov feel like more than Chekhov's intellectual interjection, particularly in the half-witted romantic effect he has on Ranevskaya's naive daughter, Anya (Katherine Waterston).

This is clearest most of all, however, with Ms. Wiest, who plays more than a variation on her usual type. At the play's opening, she is giddier and younger than anyone else, spinning through her old nursery with the sort of delusion that comes from a bad case of nostalgia; by the middle of the play, her mercurial nature comes across more as an informed fatalism -- the sort of woman who knows her charity and lack of money-sense is destructive, but cannot stop; and by the end, she's stooped over with the age and weight of her poor decisions. It's the polar opposite of the over-the-top incredulity that John Turturro brings to the other central role, that of Lopakhin, the hard-working former servant who has now earned enough so as to purchase the very cherry orchard where his parents were once slaves. In some sense, this is fine: Lopakhin is not a subtle man. On the other, Turturro reduces him -- particularly during his big third-act monologue -- to a man of all-business, with the conflicting notes of humility, relief, sorrow wrapped up entirely by one of his booming, over-the-top rants. At the start of the show, Turturro notes that "I've got money, but if you look at me, I'm still a peasant," but hints of the secret shame he feels at this -- one of the key reasons for Trofimov to be in this play, as a means of cultured contrast -- are never visible.

This is, again, where Belgrader's direction -- or lack thereof -- shows; he's too content to let the actors do their thing, with little regard for how those elements all fit together. He may be blessed with talented actors like Daniel Davis, but he doesn't go the extra mile with them: he settles for Davis's wistful and nuanced portrayal of Ranevskaya's brother, Gaev, without pushing for the sublime horror that can be shown by this semi-senile character. The same can be said for Fiers: here's a servant so old and stalwart that he is literally forgotten about at the end of the play, but while Alvin Epstein plays him well, he's used mainly for comic relief, which makes his final lines sit poorly with the rest of the production.

Ultimately, this Cherry Orchard suffers from the same abundance of riches as the orchard within the show: bright and once-majestic, these talents ultimately go to pot, mismanaged as they are.

THEATER: It Is Done

2011-11-28T18:45:00.001-05:00

The great thing about site-specific theater is that even when the play's awful, you're at least somewhere new. Thankfully, Alex Goldberg's It Is Done isn't awful -- just mediocre -- and it's in the basement of The Mean Fiddler, a cheery, old-fashioned bar, so you can pass the time with a few drinks. Passing the time is also the theme of Goldberg's ninety-minute play, in which Matt Kalman plays a horny bartender whose godforsaken watering hole is visited by two strangers, Ruby (Catia Ojeda) and Jonas (Ean Sheehy), and their two dark secrets. Or at least that's the theme of the stronger and funnier first half, in which the characters flirt with and/or disgust one another; once the ice melts (it soon gets very hot, in case the play's foreshadowing isn't clear), the play gets stuck on a single, mildly entertaining note, which largely revolves around (1) how much fun Ojeda seems to be having and (2) how infectiously close the audience is to her as she prowls around the bar.

The plotting renders its own points moot; when one character asks why certain unnatural things are happening, the reply is that "It's more fun this way," along with the disclaimer, "Well, for me." It's a one-sided cry for help, and although there are a few neat visual tricks worked out between director Tom Wojtunik and production designer Tim McMath (the paintings, the door, and the jukebox all have their moments), the dramatic balance of power never changes. It Is Done has no shortage of quips (e.g., if rotary phones are classic, so's syphilis), but writing like that's bottom-shelf theater. If we begin as flies on the wall, eavesdropping on a fresh first date, by the end we're closer to the sort of flies that buzz around a long-dead corpse.

THEATER: Seminar

2011-11-20T21:31:00.000-05:00

Douglas (Jerry O'Connell) is a slick, Yaddo-referencing, New Yorker-ready writer; the smug sort of guy who likes to talk about the so-called "interiority and exteriority" of his peers. Izzy (Hettienne Park) is his polar opposite, a rough and energetic writer, but one with the ability to go far in publishing, even if she has to flash her tits to do so. This makes Kate (Lily Rabe), the prude, spoiled would-be feminist more than a little jealous, and she'd say something about it if only she weren't so repressed. And then there's Martin (Hamish Linklater), who is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the lot of them, the sort of insecure genius whose work ends up being published posthumously. These four young writers have each paid $5,000 to secure a private workshop with the once-famous Leonard (Alan Rickman), so consider yourself lucky to have the opportunity to witness him dryly cut each of them down to size for considerably less money. Welcome to Theresa Rebeck's wickedly fun Seminar, a lesson that seeks to blur the line -- with razor-sharp wit -- between the self-diagnosed whorishness of Hollywood, the precise artlessness of The New Yorker, and the long-sought after (and ill-paid) honesty of "Literature."

Some people will inevitably be turned off by the self-absorbed nature of the play, and those who have taken a workshop will appreciate the backtalk, seething acceptance, and delusional comments quite a lot more. But director Sam Gold (as he did with the outstanding yet potentially insular Circle, Mirror, Transformation) manages to open up the production, working at a faster, sharper pace, sure, but with his patent naturalism intact. The students are sincere in their insincerity, and their professor means well with his mean-spirited comments; that's sometimes just how the world works. In Gold's hands, even Rebeck's shorthand stereotypes -- a few nymphomaniacal moments, a large tub of ice cream for a depressed girl -- manage to be successfully played for more than just laughs. (It helps that Rebeck is intensely aware of her own stylistic tics; unlike Mamet, who nowadays wallows in his own style, she is consciously making choices.)

The young actors are perfectly cast, with a surprisingly moderated turn from O'Connell and some heavy lifting from Rabe, who transforms from mousy shrew to confident sexpot. And while the play suffers a little from Martin's unwavering angst, Linklater learned enough about inflections while working on The School for Lies to at least provide some variance to all his cynical sniveling. Let's face it, though: this Seminar is largely taken for its professor, and Rickman is potent and present in this role, as much a dominating force as Linda Lavin was in Collected Stories. There's a marked difference -- as there should be -- between the master and the students, and Rickman is careful to ensure that his critiques are more than simple dismissals or snipes (Snapes?): you can see that he understands where his pupils/cast-mates are coming from, having been there once himself.

Harsh truths are rarely this entertaining, although it helps to be on the unlit side of the theater for some of the more scathing moments. Seminar may not be high art, but as Leonard reminds his students, noting the respectable positions of ghost- and screenwriters, it's still good work.

THEATER: The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness

2011-11-15T20:14:00.000-05:00

Photo/Web Begole

Real life is rarely as simplistic as fairy tales make it out to be, and the road to reconciliation is never paved with breadcrumbs. Nonetheless, there's hope and beauty in Carla Ching's The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness, which keeps the Hansel and Gretel references to a minimum, and instead focuses on the ways in which people grieve, or as the show tweets to its audience, "What do you do when you lose something you can never get back?" For Han (Christopher Larkin), you can only make sense through songs, and for his foster sister Greta (Ali Ahn), communication happens through tweets, which allow her to defend herself with Sun Tzu-like precision. Some, like Greta's housemate Miles (Bjorn Dupaty), channel their rage through dance, while others who are more advanced in the suffering of the world, like Han and Greta's guardians, Opal (April Matthis) and Doc (David Spangler), understand how to listen. But after accidentally causing a fire, Greta finds that she must prove herself not to her family, but to her hermetic jailer/counselor, Barbara "Baba" Yaga (Cindy Cheung), who has her own prescriptions for swallowing sadness with as many spoonfuls of sugar as it takes. At the same time, Han must come to grips with his own tightly wound emotions, lest he wind up just as isolated and lost in the wilderness as his sister.

The Sugar House is impeccably directed by Daniella Topol, who neatly showcases the various ways we cope and communicate, splattering tweets across Clint Ramos's two-dimensional, compressed house of a set, while wisely stepping back from interfering with the simple guitar songs written by Ching and Larkin. Topol also wisely elides over some of the more fanciful elements of the show, turning Baba from a villainous witch into a overconfident analyst, one who just happens to drug her patients, creepily stroke them (as if they were pets she were teaching to perform tricks), and occasionally lock up in isolation. It's met by an able cast, too, particularly Ahn, who never gets lost in the complexities of time-skipping script, that presents her as a rebellious arsonist one moment and an overcompensating street tough, a lighthearted sister, a mourning daughter, a betrayed and wounded girl, or a smugly Stepfordian penitent the next. In a play that lightly addresses cultural identity, moderately examines familial identity, and stresses personal identity, this is a more impressive feat than words can do justice.

Speaking of words, Ching's language is a delight, defying standard forms of expression in favor of finding words that are inexplicably right. For instance, in one of the group therapy sessions established by Baba, Greta explains that she's feeling "puce" about the fire: "It's a hot, ugly, uncomfortable color." Later, when Miles is helping Greta to survive Baba's crushing rules of conformity, he explains that "Normal is a coat you can put on or take off": in other words, we don't have to be defined or constrained by any single brushstroke. At the same time, Ching balances her poetry with simply put phrases that just as effectively capture the mood: "It's an awful thing to not have a place," says Miles, helping Greta to find her angered brother. Best of all, her characters are far from the moral saints of fairy tales: Greta isn't always deserving of sympathy, and Doc and Opal have their own moments of selfishness and resentment; the story, then, is in how they overcome themselves just to earn a shot at living happily ever after.

THEATER: Burning

2011-11-14T20:05:00.000-05:00

Photos/Monique Carboni

Thomas Bradshaw has been reading too much of the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom, for his play, the at-best-pornographic Burning, has only one motto to live by, as digested by a fourteen-year-old drug addict, Chris (Evan Johnson): "The only sin is to stifle your natural impulses, because this deprives you of being as nature wants you to be. There is nothing un-natural in this world except self-deprivation." Though Bradshaw quotes from Strindburg, too, and calls for honesty in the theater, the result is a most unnaturally acted and unconvincing mishmash that fumbles at the unspoken meanings of "family." Worse, rather than stand demonstratively on their own, these disparate plots are insultingly linked at their lowest common denominator, the Older Chris (Hunter Foster). As for the feeble echoes of various funerals, recitations of Emily Dickinson, and hookups between the two timelines (1983 and 2011), they show not that Bradshaw has tried, but that he has given up, most likely while laughing his ass off in a post-ejaculative stupor, sitting bare-assed on a pile of your money. Even taking the show as a series of slices of life, which illustrate how even incestual Neo-Nazis can be human (they're concerned about the amount of fiber in their diet, just like everyone else), they'd be the sort of slices one gets at, say, Godfather's Pizza: fugghedabout it.

Unlike previous work by Bradshaw, Burning fails to be distressingly funny (The Bereaved), provocatively offensive (Southern Promises), or surprisingly hopeful (Dawn): instead the aggressive, full-frontal nudity is now being used as a crutch, substituting physical revelations for any actual intimacy. It's theatrical prostitution, a series of impulses in search of a good hole to stick them in. Family, that big idea, is reduced to glosses like the following: Jack (Andrew Garman), a famous stage actor, and his boyfriend Simon (Danny Mastrogiorgio), a producer, take in the fourteen-year-old Chris. At first, they're merely looking for a hot, young servant, but they actually grow fond of him, and care for him even after he abandons them for Donald (Adam Trese), a treacherous playwright, and comes down with HIV. No matter how horrible the crime, it can be forgiven by true love . . . unless, of course, a businessman were to adopt a Cambodian sex slave, raise her to be an American pageant queen, and then marry her at the consensual age of twenty, a premise that Simon and his director, Noah (Andrew Polk), hypocritically reject as being pornographic.

Such unrestrained passions spill over to Older Chris's life, in which he befriends a vulnerable Franklin (Vladimir Versailles), whose only sexual experience has involved being raped by a hermaphrodite, and whose mother, like Chris's, died of an overdose. Much as Chris found release through Donald, he now teaches Franklin to be free, or at least, he would if Bradshaw were even remotely interested in exploring rather than asserting this plotline. Instead, he fixates on Franklin's first cousin twice removed, Peter (Stephen Tyrone Williams), who is married to Chris's half-sister, Josephine (Larisa Polonsky), and Peter's collision course with the aforementioned incestuous Neo-Nazis, Michael (Drew Hildebrand) and Katrin (Reyna de Courcy). Or, at least, he would if he didn't also have to deal with introducing Peter to a Sudanese prostitute named Gretchen (Barrett Doss), whom he fantasizes is his recently dead first cousin -- Franklin's mother -- Lucy. This half-attentive attitude extends to Scott Elliotts's direction, which has the brusque, surface-level feel of a staged reading, and to the actors themselves, who act as if they're trying to put distance between themselves and their actions. The tenderness of "evil" people and the misplaced sincerity of the "just" are lost in this production, and if it appears as if Bradshaw is trying to make a statement about the artificial constructs of so-called "good" and "bad" things, it is simply because he wishes audiences to be too confused to label Burning as the awful shell of a play that it is.

THEATER: Dream Walker

2011-11-11T18:13:00.001-05:00

Comics, particularly the long-running ones, often suffer from a sort of disassociative identity disorder, in that they've been worked on by so many writers and artists that they no longer belong to any one person; instead, they become a pop-cultural part of our collective consciousness: from issue to issue, they are whatever we need them to be. August Schulenburg's latest offering, Dream Walker, initially suffers from and ultimately benefits from this porous definition. What starts out as an cheesy "superhero" comic, with overdrawn Liefeld-like limbs and exclamatory, Stan Lee-style plotting, becomes, over the course of ninety minutes, something more suggestive and alluring, a Sandman-esque anthology looking at the nature of hope, imagination, and love.

The basic concept is that Richie (Collin Smith), an idle, idealistic, and id-filled would-be-writer, awakes one day to find that he can enter other people's dreams, connecting through some sort of mystical sleepwalking switchboard ('nuff said). His fastidious and tightly strung brother, Gary (Matthew Archambault), is dismissive of the idea, which causes him to come across as a bit of an asshole to the girl he's just started to date, Dawn (Jennifer Somers Kipley). What ensues is a clash between the peevishly practical and impishly impractical, for Richie, hoping to influence Dawn's dreams to make her love Gary again, accidentally makes Dawn fall for him. It's a little ironic, and a sign of character plotting that still need to be worked out, that the problematic part of the previous sentence is the breakup between Gary and Dawn, which occurs without warning, and is caused by an infidelity that Gary can't adequately explain. (Something to do with how his sense of unworthiness causes him to sabotage relationships, which is not what you'd expect of a swim-team champion and literal life-saver.)

It's at this point that the dreams shift from being gimmicks to being a part of the play. The early sequences, like "Dream Walker vs. The Big Bad Brother Boss" are simple stories meant to hint at Richie's powers, with a distant narrator explaining the pantomimed action. Latter dreams -- like the one in which Richie tries to talk to his brother, only to get unforgivingly killed by him, time and again -- are still funny (see the references to Mortal Kombat and Clue), but they're also deepening our understanding of the characters. This is also where Schulenburg gets looser with his imagery, getting all figurative and allegorical with his writing -- a good thing, since he's perhaps a stronger writer when not being so literal.

Dream Walker has quite a few kinks -- many on the technical side, which is to be expected of a new production company -- and would most likely benefit from a more visual direction that emphasizes the differences (and similarities) between reality and dream. (Consider the effects well-used by Ruhl, Callaghan, and Schwartz, to name a few at-times magical playwrights.) Still, save for a few blocking issues, Mariella Duke does a fine job of presenting the play, just as Smith (who seems to be channeling a little bit of Charlie Day's energies) does an outstanding job as the dreamer, loose enough to allow for just about anything, but grounded enough in clear wants and needs such that the play doesn't fly apart. So far as dreams go, can one ask for anything more?

metaDRAMA: Going With My Gut (I)

2011-11-09T18:57:00.001-05:00

The first in a series of unresearched, immediate responses to things I've read in American Theater and/or other arts-related magazines.

From the November '11 American Theater:
"To director Michelle Rougier, the decision [for city officials in Carrollton, GA] to shut down [a community theater production] The Rocky Horror Show is tantamount to censorship. "The city approved this show, and all the publicity that was done said that it was R-rated."

Edit: remove the word "tantamount." It's censorship, plain and simple. The only reason to pull city funding from a community show would be if the company had deceived the city about the content of the play. As for the choice to revoke the use of the venue given that it is "inappropriate for the center," I'm just confused. Time and again, Republicans insist that money has the right to speak, and government should not be involved, so in a red-head state like George, why, if the company can afford to rent the hall, can't they?

I'm reminded of my own experience doing a community show back at Stuyvesant High School in '00, in which our production of Israel Horovitz's Line had been approved by an inattentive faculty adviser who had apparently not read the script. Three days before opening -- when we started putting up fliers that clearly stated the content of the show -- we were told that the show was now being shut down. No apology was offered, no alternative venue was suggested, and our attempts to get waivers from parents signalling their approval for the show, or for their children to see it, was denied. For those of you unfamiliar with Line, the most risque thing that actually happens is dance-as-metaphor-for-fucking, and while the show certainly has some suggestive lines and actions, the idea that the community needs to be protected from something nobody is forcing them to see is literally disturbing to me. For the record, the show the school was producing? The Crucible, which as we all know has absolutely nothing to do with sex.

From the October '11 American Theater:
"True criticism that is expansive and acknowledges work on its own terms, not a narrow idea of performance.... The reviewer was applying her idea of what theatre should be with no regard to the artist's intentions.... We have to stop surveying these works as if creating theatre is like making a good bar of soap, in which the value of the work is based on the number of audience members that like it."

Powerful thoughts from Marissa Chibas, an actor and theatre instructor in California. With her latter point about the craft of theater, I don't disagree in the slightest: the value of the work belongs within the work itself, and those attached to it. But I do find it a little disingenuous to say that critics must engage the work on its own level: we each approach theater in our own way, and to say that there is a specific way that art is meant to be experienced is to imply that there is only one right way to view a Picasso, only one correct reading of a short story, one valid emotion to be provoked by a piece of music.

From my own critical perspective, I do attempt to understand the playwright's goals (or director's, in the case of a revival), and where I have biases against a certain type of theater, I try to acknowledge them. (There's a reason you rarely see me covering one-man shows, high camp, burlesque, or Greek dramas.) But once I've addressed what I believe is being attempted, I've every right to talk about how that worked (or didn't) on my terms, with the vocabulary and experience that I've got. If you trust the audience to take your performance on its own terms, you've got to be able to trust the audience to be able to read a review on their own terms, that they'll understand that my dislike of something is not necessarily going to be theirs.

This is why I argue for the consistency and longevity of critics: the more you read from a single voice, the more you understand what their view is -- and the easier it becomes for you to determine where your view diverges from theirs. That can be helpful, too, and I'd argue that it's more "true" than a criticism that never clashes with the artist's goals.

THEATER: The Runner Stumbles

2011-11-09T18:16:00.003-05:00

Photo/Kristen Vaughan

The Runner Stumbles, written in 1974 (and on Broadway in 1976), may be based on the true story of the murder of Sister Mary Janina back in the early 1900s (the play is set in Michigan, 1911), but it has not aged well. Milan Stitt's script, written in a populist and preachy style, uses the framework of a murder trial to hook the audience, and the testimony of witnesses and interviews between the inexperienced defense, Toby (Ric Sechrest), and his muted client, the former priest Rivard (Christopher Patrick Mullen), to provide flashbacks. It's a rather onerous way of getting to the good stuff: the emotionally fraught and potentially murderous relationship between the forward-thinking Rivard and the outspoken and unconventional Sister Rita (Casandera M. J. Lollar). Fatigably directed by Peter Zinn, it's a stumble that the play never fully recovers from.

Ideally, the tight compression of the six months that lead to the sister scandalously living under the same roof as Rivard (the fellow nuns come down with consumption), are meant to speed by so rapidly that we think nothing of the eroding "propriety," save for a few concerns voiced by Rivard's housekeeper, the converted and penitent Mrs. Shandig (Heather E. Cunningham). Instead, the scenes contemplatively crawl, with idle pauses and overly-reasoned dialogues drained of all passion. With the exception of the climax, even the more argumentative scenes feel scaled back. (This may be due in part to the awkward L-shaped seating of the Richmond Shepard space, or the acoustics that occasionally make the more whisper-y actors inaudible.) Of note, the Act I finale, in which Rivard cuts himself to prove that he does bleed, goes from an abrupt and shocking act to a deliberate and precise cut. The script suggests that Rivard smear blood on Sister Rita; the actual staging, like most of the show, is relatively bloodless.

This awkwardness extends to the courtroom scenes. Nat Cassidy, as the Prosecutor, attempts to build up some steam in his interrogations: an impossible task, for his scenes are always cut off. (The show suffers from a marked lack of momentum.) The low budget and frustrating lighting don't help either, in that shifts between past and present require scenic adjustments, and one's eye is all too frequently drawn to witnesses who are frozen in place as the scene attempts to "shift." The script facilitates some transitions better than others, like that of Louise (Becky Byers), a Crucible-like child who takes the stand to get even; others, like Rivard's rival, the Monsignor Nicholson (Jim Boerlin), are in the background so long they practically qualify as sets.

At its repetitious heart -- Stitt has a habit of recycling lines for "emphasis" -- the scenes between Rivard and Rita are quite good. Mullen in particular grows into the role, alternating as he does between the different sorts of strength -- personal and religious -- that have brought him so much trouble, and which have so confused the impressionable Rita. He's fortunate, too, to be paired against Lollar, who makes him work harder; his confrontations in the courthouse are far feebler (and less rehearsed with the fight choreographer).

Retro Productions has made a name for themselves focusing on revivals; hopefully this, their sixth-season premiere, is but a stumble.

THEATER: Hand to God

2011-11-08T10:37:00.001-05:00

Photo/Gerry Goodstein

Life used to be easy, posits the puppet Tyrone: "When you had to shit, you just let it drop." But as humankind evolved, started working together in groups, things like "good" and "evil" came in to play, and each generation has faced more and harder restrictions than the last. With that subversive grain floating around our brains, the lights come up on Robert Askins's Hand to God to reveal Tyrone's operator, Jason (Steven Boyer), a mild-mannered fifteen-year-old who, like his mother, Margery (Geneva Carr), is having trouble coping with the world after the loss of his unhappy father (who ate himself to death). Their emotions are repressed, unlike those of the local bad boy, Timothy (Bobby Moreno), who, having been forced into Margery's Christian puppet-theater workshop, wastes no time insulting his classmate, Jessica (Megan Hill), an overachieving student. Just as puppets were used to surreptitiously sermonize to children, so too is the cast soon treated like puppets -- with over-the-top aplomb, energetically directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel -- in order to prove Tyrone's opening assertion about the troubles (and benefits) of living in a world of rules.

Askins's script is filled with big moments, and only just grounded by the presence of Pastor Greg (Scott Sowers), who, despite pathetically longing for Margery, remains levelheaded in the chaos that ensues once the class begins to suspect that Jason's hand -- Tyrone -- is possessed by the devil. But while the large moments are excellently held down by Boyer, a talented physical comic actor who gets opportunities to show off both Jim Carrey-esque battles with himself and Evil Dead 2-like levels of blood-soaked camp, the little moments get lost in the chaos. For instance, it's clear how shitty Timothy's life is, the way that he struggles to express himself to Margery through violence, winding up in a semi-masochistic relationship with her once she decides that she's done being "nice," and Moreno does a fine job as the angsty, hormonal teen, but it feels somewhat empty, as if there's nothing more to his character than this one moment of realized passion: where's the fallout? Likewise, while it's clear that Jessica has an unusual crush on Jason, her attempt to "save" Jason from Tyrone by using her own (sexually active) puppet, Jolene, is so hilarious that the sincerity beneath it is often lost.

Goodness shines through -- Hand to God is definitely worth seeing, especially if you liked Avenue Q -- but the play gets as confused as it suggests humans are, lost along the way to so-called "righteousness." But in fairness to the moral, "bad" and "good" are arbitrarily assigned terms. All you really need to know is that Hand to God is a shockingly fun way to spend two hours.

THEATER: Queen of the Mist

2011-11-07T11:12:00.002-05:00

Photo/Carol Rosegg

There's perhaps too much of Anna "Annie" Edson Taylor in Michael John LaChiusa's new musical about the last twenty years of her life, Queen of the Mist. For while it's true that there is greatness present, the show has as much trouble showing it as did Annie. In that light, the musical fails as the jaunty biography of this little-known 63 year-old woman, who, in 1901, became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel (and survive), bloated with tangential moments (and songs) about the Pan-American Expo, McKinley's assassination, and Carrie Nation's rhetoric. It succeeds, ironically, in the second act by charting the muddy waters of Taylor's downfall (post-fall), debunking the so-called hero mythos in the process and getting away from the more repetitive, plot-summarizing songs like those of "The Barrel," whose lyrics/ingredients are: "Fifteen inches at the base, thirty-four inches in the center, twenty-two inches at the top." Only Mary Testa's searing, soul-searching performance as Mrs. Taylor keeps the show afloat, equal parts confidence and desperation, as seen in the frenzied, wild-eyed "Laugh at the Tiger."

As is often the issue with daredevils, the writing is exceedingly thin, strong enough to last only as long as the stuntperson remains in the air. Annie needs conflict, but finds none -- not from her fragile sister, Jane (Theresa McCarthy), who casts her out and largely disappears, nor from her manager, Mr. Frank Russell (Andrew Samonsky), who is meant to be the voice of reason, if for no other reason than to protect his own liabilities. Samonsky does a fine job trying to sell us on his huckster-with-a-heart character, but his struggles show the issues with LaChiusa's script: we only ever get the huckster moments. Though he asks Annie for forgiveness, we remember him only as the rogue who drunkenly attempts to make money off of Annie by using a Taylor impersonator in "Million Dolla' Momma." Even Testa faces similar struggles: the scene in which she accuses a dismissive Carrie Nation of greed ("You comfort yourself saying you're not a whore/neither am I/but we need more/more green to get by") is quite out of character, and works only because Testa's given plenty of other opportunities. Meanwhile, the ensemble suffers the worst of it, for while they sing prettily enough (save for a few odd disharmonies whenever the orchestra drops out), their characters are flat cut-outs, like DC Anderson's shouty "new manager," Tally Sessions's "Man with his Hand Wrapped in a Handkerchief" (the McKinley shooter), and Stanley Bahorek's portrayal of Mike (no relation) Taylor, a soldier who shows up to reassure a by-this-point delusional Annie that her act did give some, like him, courage and inspiration.

The structure of Queen of the Mist and Annie's life sloppily parallel each other so often that LaChiusa must have done so intentionally, if not ill-advisedly: after all, why would you want to make a musical that has no idea what it wants to do with itself? Director Jack Cummings III works well with what he's given -- a narrow swath of gymnasium flooring between two risers filled with audience members, a misty scrim that hides the orchestra, and an old piano that sweeps between the two sides of the stage -- but this is ultimately a show without a big idea, with a lackluster musical theme, and either a problematic first or second act: your call.

THEATER: Two-Man Kidnapping Rule

2011-11-05T17:41:00.003-04:00

Photo/Ryan Wijayaratne

Are you still reeling from your last relationship? Unable to find work? Stuck wearing a ridiculous reindeer sweater for the Christmas holidays? It sounds as if you need to bro it out with your best buds, head off to the clubs, find some available women, and bury your troubles in someone else for a while. If that sounds appealing, I recommend that you pick up your phone, hit up your friends, and do exactly that. You should only be checking out Joseph Gallo's Two-Man Kidnapping Rule if you want to play it safe, for this show is so filled with unfulfilled boasts and unearned morals that it has little room for anything real.

Jack (Curran Connor, acting and looking like an unfunny Adam Scott) is the bummed-out dude who kicks things off, dropping in on his old friend Vincent (Duane Cooper) -- not to hang out, but to complain about the latest and most final loss of the supposed love-of-his-life, Laura. Gallo states that the two have been friends since the ninth grade (both are now in their late twenties), largely because this isn't obvious from the chemistry between the two actors, who remain distanced from one another, even when crammed into a car. Cooper in particular seems uncomfortable with all the stereotypes Vincent is forced to fulfill as the man-child whose idea of friendship involves heavy ribbing, and who insists on dispensing relationship advice despite his inability to do anything but sleep with married women. (Think of the relationship between Barney and Ted on How I Met Your Mother, only, again, without the humor.) For instance: Jack is performing a one-man memory play as he sorts through his "ex-box" (a shoebox filled with memories from his time with Laura), when he stumbles across some nude photos of other women; Vincent confesses that he's been whacking off to these pictures and calls it his "holding fee." How . . . clever.

In any event, when Jack announces his intent to drive down from New Jersey to Texas to reunite with Laura, even though she's made it clear that she's marrying someone else, Vincent invokes an old rule from their childhood: the titular "two-man kidnapping rule," which allows any two members of the group to force a third member to do what they want, if it's in that third member's best interest. (You're free to debate whose best interest this play is in; the beloved New Ohio Theater seems determined to draw in a younger audience, regardless of the cost.) To do so, Vincent enlists the help of Seth (Andy Lutz, an exceptional cross between the manic Jesse Tyler Ferguson and dour Raul Esparza), and the three drive off to Bar Anticipation, to hook up with Match.com women. Never mind that the kidnapping rule seems a bit arbitrary when they allow the fourth member of their group, the soon-to-be-married Robbie, to beg off; Gallo is writing under a curtain of convenience, which is why Seth soon announces that he's also gotten engaged. It's one more thing for the wallowing romantic Jack and relationship-defiant Vincent to clash over. (This being a comedy about bros in their early adulthood, fists will be thrown at some point.)

Gallo has a few original moments of specificity in his play -- the term "mood dick," which deals with a specific sort of pee-shy person, or a sweet memory evoked by the image of the Pillsbury Doughboy -- but the vast majority of Two-Man Kidnapping Rule seems as if it's been snatched out of other contemporary comedies, largely sitcoms, which know better than to draw such shallow matters out over two hours. There are no stakes in the play, the catharsis is largely off-stage, and the resolutions are abrupt and unearned. Even were the show perfectly cast, it would drag: there are too many artificial situations for it to do otherwise. (Consider the arrival of a second Laura, who we never even meet; the sudden need to hit up a road-side ATM; and Jack's poor driving skills, which cause them to nearly hit a truck . . . twice!)

The most realistic portion of Two-Man Kidnapping Rule is the way director Robin A. Paterson has staged the driving that takes up half the play. Craig Lenti's sound design is dead-on, as is the pantomime from the actors that accompanies the turn signals, mirror-checking, and operation of windows and doors. Those moments seem completely natural, as if they've been ingrained in these people for years on end -- it's a shame that the decades-old friendship that is the centerpiece of the show isn't nearly as smooth.

THEATER: The Complete World of Sports [abridged]

2011-10-23T19:54:00.001-04:00

Photo/Meghan Moore

Though the core members have come and gone over the years, the Reduced Shakespeare Company (best known for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [abridged]) is as thankfully hyperactive as ever: they'll need that stamina to win audiences over throughout the various hits and misses that make up their four-quarter "abridgathon," The Complete World of Sports [abridged]. Their low-budget, sketch-happy, motor-mouthed skewering of the roughly "3,477.3" sports out there does fairly well with generalities: what it lacks in the satiric chops of, say, the Onion Sports Network, it more than makes up for in slapstick. The result is rough yet entertaining, filled with both fumbles and hundred-yard-returns, and their encyclopedic range allows for some clever segments: Karl Marx and Michael Moore arguing in favor of football, a brief demonstration of bullfighting's blatant inhumanity, the asinine difference between "sports" and "games" (if it's on ESPN, it's a sport), and a Lehrer-like reinvention of fight songs.

Given the company's pedigree, however, it's a shame that so much seems merely passable. Sports are so often mocked that a lot of targets seem especially low-hanging: "Hey, baseball's pretty boring, right?" or "You realize, if you take this innocuous broadcaster's comments out of context, it totally sounds homosexual." (The company does itself no favors in quoting from the great Yogi Berra, who would give his right arm to be ambidextrous.) In turn, this brings down the more original moments: an actual "fantasy" league, replete with Klingons and Jedi, or a conflated breakdown of cliches and mixed metaphors from films and coaches. A team is only a strong as its weakest link, so its safe to say that some segments should have been benched: unresolved bits on boxing and Australia come to mind, as does the twenty-minute climax, the "Olympish Tricotakaidathlon," which offers nothing you haven't already seen in the previous eighty minutes.

As for the audience-participation, the less said, the better. There's a reason fans aren't allowed on the field during the actual game, and that's because they pale in comparison to a well-oiled unit like Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor (who have been writing and directing together since 1992) and their fellow thespiathlete, Matt Rippy, who joined the company in 1996. It's their enthusiasm that carries even the silliest scenes (and wackiest wigs), and it's their faux naivety -- particularly Rippy's -- that allows the audience to laugh with them. And while it's not the greatest sign that even the seemingly ad-libbed moments of Sports [abridged] are scripted -- the group shouldn't need self-deprecating recoveries for failed jokes -- it's at least reassuring that the RSC is determined to make you (and the family) laugh at all costs. Bad sports cliche or not, they've got heart.

Recommendation: The Pumpkin Pie Show

2011-10-22T12:20:00.002-04:00

Several times now, I've had last minute things come up that conspire to keep me from covering this year's annual dose of The Pumpkin Pie Show, the creepily poetic show from Clay McLeod Chapman that turns real-life horror stories (the supernatural need not necessarily apply; the world is frightening enough) into potent monologues. This year's showcase, "Lovey Dovey" features performances both from Pumpkin regulars Chapman and partner-in-crime Hanna Cheek as well as live music from Kyle Jarrow's band, Sky-Pony. It's both the treat and the trick I'm getting this Halloween, and you can catch it this final weekend (Thursday - Saturday) at UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st and A).

THEATER: The Invested

2011-09-15T12:37:00.000-04:00

As we've seen over the last few years, greed may not actually be all that good for the economy, but when it comes to the theater, the bubble on Wall Street dramas hasn't even come close to bursting. Sharyn Rothstein's The Invested won't be the play that pops it, but neither is it a play that particularly pops. While there are some sure-fire zingers, most delivered by Bill Enoch (Thomas Hildreth), the shady new CEO of "MetroBank" (see if you can figure out which institution this represents), Ron Canada's presentation and Rothstein's plotting is fairly tame, yoked to a sexism-related subplot that never makes it off the back-burner.

Some key research seems to be missing, which leads the play to rely so heavily on the emotional reactions of the passed-over, would-be-CEO Catherine Murdock (Christina Haag) that it never adequately explains what this fund has actually done, nor what its massive downgrade and the subsequent internecine conflict between Bill and Catherine means. We're told that investments are "iffy," just as board member Jane Griffin (the fabulous Judith Hawking) only ever tells us that she's fighting for Catherine. As for stakes, long-time client Sid Simon (Bill Cwikowski, turning a stereotype into a down-to-earth hoot) puts such a human face on them that Murdock is driven (by her heart and the scale model of the Code of Hammurabi on her desk) to reimburse Sid's losses out of the bank's own pocket. That problem solved, the play spends the rest of its time worrying only about Murdock's job, and frankly, that's an uninteresting one, given her multimillion-dollar status.

What one looks for in a bank is akin to what one looks for in a show: a strong identity, a great deal of focus, and a high return on investment (time, money, etc.). What The Invested delivers is a potent premise; a wandering plot that lingers on Catherine's adorably naive new assistant, Madeline (Turna Mete, who is likeable enough to merit her own play), and her improbable involvement with the married, annoying, office clown Henry (Michael Daniel Anderson); and an only somewhat fulfilling return. (This return stems almost entirely from the dialogue, not the characters: "If my panties got damp every time I met a snake charmer, I'd have died of thirst by now." "Sexism is dead, the only -ism left is capital, and you're fucking with it.") Strip out the assistants, focus on the alliance of women between Catherine and Jane, turn Bill into a more understandable villain, and you'd have a one-act powerhouse: the relationships are there, our interest is piqued. (Rothstein's Neglect is still one of the better two-person plays I've seen -- perhaps her scope is too large here.)

Instead of being this year's Microcrisis (a fiercely satirical piece about the next big bubble), The Invested is merely a safe way to spend two hours -- you'll laugh, a little -- which is ironic given the show's own tag-line: "The bigger the risk, the bigger the return."

THEATER: The Lapsburgh Layover

2011-09-14T10:02:00.006-04:00

Photo/Ben Arons

If going to the theater seems a little like visiting an exotic country, the Berserker Residents have merely made that more literal. The moment you arrive at Ars Nova, you are given travel documents, ushered into the underbelly of the theater for an honor-based security check, and then brought to the main hall of an obscure country in which you, an airline passenger on an emergency landing, will have dinner and entertainment provided by the nation's people: "Welcome to Lapsburgh," they tell you, providing brochures, sales pitches, and boasts of their cultural history. "Please don't go!"

The Lapsburgh Layover isn't quite a site-specific work (though there is some charmingly light audience interaction), but Lisi Stoessel's set, which festoons itself throughout the entire space, not just the dinner-theater stage, helps to make it feel like one -- the atmospheric effect is similar to that employed by The Mad Ones. The piece is also well-directed by Oliver Butler, whose hyper-visual work and layered work with the Debate Society has helped him both to provide context for the joke-heavy script and to smoothly handle the play-within-a-play, "Detective Mickey and the Case of What Happened at Club Regard," with which Oleg Tolsten (Dave Johnson), Zelda Tre'Force (Leah Walton), Olaf Nystabakk (Justin Jain), and Jebozya Gilsty (Bradley K. Wren) are attempting (successfully) to entertain the waiting passengers (you).

Simply nailing the noir-spoof "Detective Mickey" would be enough for most companies ("Make it a double," goes one line, answered with: "The usual? The usual?"). After all, they're already dealing with a ridiculously sinister man-woman villain, Carmen, and a unique battle between hypnotists, to say nothing of the many deaths of Nystabakk's characters -- a bartender drowned in a drink, a Big Fancy Mayor who is blown to pieces (and then used as a meat-puppet). But the Berserkers go several steps further: their Lapsburghian characters have their own rivalries -- mainly between Gilsty, who believes himself to be professional, and Tolsten, who is "just" a farmer, but who gets the lead role on account of Tre'Force's attraction to him -- and these keep interrupting the scenes. At the same time, there's also a mysterious rumbling echoing throughout the theater (M. L. Dogg should be proud of his sound design), which occasionally forces scenes to be abridged or otherwise ad-libbed. There's so much -- and that's really the only flaw: it's so unrelentingly funny that it never transcends to meet its unexpected ending; so packed full of funny moments that there's little room to expand on the individual character quirks. (Given their high-strung comedy, they do manage to convey panic in a credible fashion.)

Still, if it's a question of whether you'll enjoy yourself in Lapsburgh, the answer is most certainly "yes." Both the actors and their characters are eager to please, particularly the hard-working Jain, whose "PowerPoint" presentation of the Lapsburghian attractions is the highlight of the evening. (The whole thing is done with transparency slides.) Additionally, the intimacy of the setting -- much of the play takes place in the aisles -- provides extra laughs, for "Detective Mickey" is done with an extremely cheap budget, so you may wind up watching a character "die" (flailing about to the clacking sound effects of "bullets") in the seat next to you.

Plausible, no; hilarious, yes. The Lapsburgh Layover feels like a vacation in ToonTown.

THEATER: Follies

2011-09-13T03:57:00.000-04:00

They don't make musicals like Follies any more. In fact, even in the unassailable repertoire of Stephen Sondheim, there is hardly anything like it. I mean, a musical about two married couples returning to the theater of their youth on the verge of its destruction, and reflecting on the ghosts -- literally depicted -- of their past regrets? A musical which spends a large part of the second act lost in a fantasia called "Loveland" that's filled with the dancing vaudevillian embodiments of their follies? (Imagine if Book of Mormon's "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" went on for another five songs.) Yes, the show's unbalanced in tone and a bit redundant in message, as if Sondheim distrusted his own clarion instincts, and yes, it might be better if some of the regretful numbers didn't seem quite so extraneous and revue-like ("Ah, Paris!" and "One More Kiss" leap to mind). But if ever a show could justify its own youthful, exuberant mistakes, wouldn't it be Follies? And in the hands of Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, and Danny Burstein, wouldn't this be a pretty good rendition?

Enough with the questions: doubt tends to lead to regret, and there's none of that here, for Follies is a memorable musical well worth seeing (especially if you haven't), an honest-to-god adult musical: yes, there are affairs and loveless marriages, but they aren't rashly dissolved -- there's weight behind every syllable of every year that Phyllis (the astounding Maxwell) saw squandered with her husband, Ben (Ron Raines): "Could I Leave You?" she spit-sing-snarls in her bring-down-the-house number; it's both tragically simple and hopelessly complex. The same goes for the relationship between flighty Sally (Peters, divinely mousey in the role), who loved Ben, and the aptly named Buddy (Burstein), for whom she settled. Buddy, the perfect gentleman, is at odds with himself, for while he's found the perfect woman -- Margie, who we never meet -- he's married to "The Right Girl," with whom he's still helplessly in love.

It's on the strength of these emotions, these regretted and re-examined relationships, that we're willing to follow the cast into their own minds, scenically represented by Derek McLane's feathery, Georgia O'Keefe series of prosceniums. And it's on the strength of songs like the pattering "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues" that we're willing to stay there, even if this Buddy song's rehashing the Margie/Sally relationship woes he's just been raging over. The only problematic song is "Losing My Mind," a terrific slow-burn that Eric Schaeffer unfortunately stages almost identically to the earlier, equally fiery, "I'm Still Here." Everywhere else, the show manages to distinguish its nuances and layers -- note the bright colors Gregg Barnes gives the older women and the duller shades in which the ghosts are clad, or the way in which Natasha Katz's lighting only ever touches the present-day characters. It's a shame for the staging to falter, especially with Warren Carlyle proving himself an able choreographer in both the solid "Who's That Woman" and the slinky "The Story of Lucy and Jesse."

The same lack of distinctness goes for the subplots: Jayne Houdyshell is perhaps too noticeable as Hattie, the solid singer of "Broadway Baby"; when her vignette's done, you keep waiting for her to step back into the foreground. And while it's a shame that Emily (Susan Watson) appears to be going senile, you'd be forgiven for missing that -- there are but two lines that refer to it, and her cute duet "Rain on the Roof" all but washes her central tragedy away. It's not clear that any director would be more able to navigate these shakier bits, but they might at least speed through them: it sometimes feels as if Schaeffer himself is lost in the dilapidated scenery. Then again, it's Sondheim: who can blame him for wallowing? Follies: in which things can be so wrong, that they wind up right once more . . . and that's the greatest tragedy of them all.

THEATER: The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill

2011-09-12T23:12:00.000-04:00

Photo/Anton Nickel

Ever read 3nuts or Garfield Minus Garfield? If so, then you'll feel right at home with the latest full-length production from the New York Neo-Futurists, The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill: Vol. 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays, which recontextualizes early O'Neill plays by performing only the stage directions, albeit in a selectively adapted and comically directed fashion, both courtesy of Christopher Loar. It's somewhat of a party trick, and if this isn't already an improv game, it soon will be. But at a swift seventy-five minutes, it doesn't wear itself out, thanks especially to the game six-person ensemble and their nimble-tongued narrator, Jacquelyn Landgraf. And while it's not necessarily as revelatory as earlier Neo-Futurist shows, like The Soup Show, it succeeds in expanding the company's repertory to a whole new level of non-illusory theater, one that's filled both with humor and existential terror (Beckett fans will rejoice): see both Lauren Sharpe's whimsically lewd depiction of O'Neill's description of a painting that's "an orgy of colors," and the way that she struggles under the weight of a dozen somewhat contradictory and poetically vague descriptions. (Consider the phrase "inefficiently pompous." Good. Now try to express that.)

Perhaps most surprising is the general clarity -- and hopelessness, presented here with humor -- that remains even in drastically abridged versions of O'Neill. The seven plays range from 1913 to 1917, covering everything from what appears to be a low-class gangster drama ("The Web") to the last shreds of humanity found on a shark-surrounded lifeboat ("Thirst") and the secret affairs of the upper-class ("Servitude"). These changes of pace are much appreciated, since the majority of the show is presented in Our Town minimalism, with the performance space blocked off in white tape so as to leave the wings (and idle actors) onstage, their entrances now as much a part of the show as in, say, those from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And yet, it's the uniform nature of the show, of the wardrobe -- grays, browns, suspenders -- that allows the uniquely flawed, peccably perfect language to stand out. Consider the half-whisper -- "Whis...," calls one actor -- or a "sigh . . . that is kind of like a moan." If there's an imbalance, it is a slight one, noticed only occasionally in the difference between the way a veteran Neo-Futurist like Cara Francis or Erica Livingston "throws herself into a chair" and the way Danny Burnam, Brendan Donaldson, and Connor Kalista do. [Update: As noted in the comments below, Kalista is actually one of the more senior Neo-Futurists; the error is mine, although I maintain that there's a difference in abandon between the men and women of this cast, one that in no way detracts from the enjoyment of the show.]

The text may be Eugene O'Neill's, but Christopher Loar has boldly liberated these "directions," like so much found art: chiseled out of one era and cast anew. And while the final five minutes are particularly clever, in the way in which they elevates both a simple stage effect and an absurd punchline, you could just as easily say that of any part of the show -- the chaos of an accordion in "Bound East for Cardiff" or the triplicate effect Loar uses to echo the very basic elements of "Before Breakfast." So with that in mind, here are your stage directions: take the F train to Second Avenue, walk to Fourth Street, and check out The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill.

Curtain.

THEATER: Whale Song, or: Learning to Live with Mobyphobia

2011-08-24T23:15:00.001-04:00

There are plenty of theater companies out there that produce plays about women who have lost their fathers: grief is a popular topic. But there are few that are willing to risk pursuing such a story from a different angle -- through, say, a whale-sized metaphor -- and it's a genuine pleasure to see Dreamscape Theatre (as they did for The Burning Cities Project) and artistic director Brad Raimondo behind the wheel of Claire Kiechel's Whale Song, or: Learning to Live with Mobyphobia. Maya (Hollis Witherspoon) reacts to the possible suicide of her father, James (Gavin Starr Kendall), by summoning a whale into the Hudson River; unable to confront it, she spends her days teaching her first-grade students all about the etymology of "orca" and the inevitability of death, and her nights sheltered in her apartment, listening to an increasingly surreal reporter (Rosie Sowa) who begins to address her directly.

The script's a bit unpolished, particularly with the inclusion of Shep, the "motherfucking" drummer (Jordan Douglas Smith), though that's to be expected, given that Maya hires him as a literal distraction. Maya's boyfriend, Mark (Ryan Feyk), also needs to be less of a pushover -- similar to the way Maya's sister, Sarah (Siri Hellerman), is the voice of reason; Witherspoon's a solid actress, but she's forced to self-generate much her angst. That said, Kiechel nails the ending, as we learn exactly why Maya hates whales so much -- it involves another death in the family -- and why she's so obsessed with stories and significance. In addition, Raimondo's direction is spot on, from the way Maya's thoughts are manifested in shipping boxes that gradually overflow throughout her apartment to the staging of the news segments, which is done behind Maya, so that it looks as if we are seeing her thoughts, rather than what's actually on TV. Credit's also due to Sam Kusnetz's sound design: given that the theme of the play is about finding meaning where you look for it, it helps to have some genuine whale songs echoing through the La MaMa space.

THEATER: Paper Cut

2011-08-24T22:49:00.002-04:00

At one point, however long ago, you were a kid, and when you were, you probably spent some time playing with toys, making up intricate stories with which the various characters might interact. (If you were never a child, pick up Toy Story and see what you missed out on.) That's very much the sort of theater that Yael Rasooly's interested in making, a semi-solipsistic art that she calls "paper and object theater," a large part of which involves her manipulation of photographs, cut-out paper figures, pop-up books, and various other "flat" puppetry, all while providing the sort of exaggerated voice-over that was all the rage in black-and-white "classic" dramas. The paper-thin plot's beside the point -- Ms. Dolores is a stressed-out, solitary secretary who pines for her boss, even as he obliviously asks her to transcribe love letters to other women -- but it justifies Rasooly's flights of fantasy: creative homages to both over-the-top romances and, as her paranoia invades, Hitchcock. (In terms of inventiveness, it's a bit like a one-woman version of The 39 Steps.) Boiled down to its most simple elements, Paper Cut is a bit one-dimensional, but when she folds together a series of fast-paced accents and title cards to simulate a whirlwind honeymoon, or when she gamely attempt to sing through a bundle of quick-cut love songs (needle skips and all), one can only marvel at her theatrical origami.

THEATER: Catch Me If You Can

2011-08-22T01:26:00.001-04:00

"Live in Living Color" boasts the opening number of Catch Me If You Can: The Broadway Musical, with Frank Abagnale, Jr., on the verge of being arrested at the Miami International Airport, convincing Agent Carl Hanratty of the FBI to let him tell his story to the audience. And yet, the show is dulled from the get-go by a by-the-numbers Sinatraesthetic style of playing it cool, which plays very much against the showier strengths of choreographer Jerry Mitchell (La Cage aux Folles, Hairspray) and the inventiveness of Jack O'Brien (The Coast of Utopia). The two are hard-pressed to do much of anything with David Rockwell's sliding bandstand of a set taking up most of the stage, and even playwright Terrence McNally seems limited, though it's hard to blame the source material, which Spielberg managed to make sparkle. The first sign of life doesn't come until halfway through the first act, with Hanratty's spastic (and Tony-winning, for Norbert Leo Butz) "Don't Break the Rules," which says a lot about the dangers of mounting a show that does nothing but follow the rules.

Catch Me If You Can is perfectly inoffensive: with neither the shock of The Book of Mormon nor the "awe" of Spider-man, there's nothing here you can't see elsewhere. Or perhaps it is offensive, in that it wastes the talents of Kerry Butler, who, as Frank's girlfriend, has but two songs in the second act, one of which ("Fly, Fly Away") gives Butz's heart-wrenching solo, "The Man Inside the Clues," a run for its money. Both actors play characters from the inside-out, an asthmatic cough and wobble in his step there, a fluttery prayer and resolute stomp from her there. Problematically, it's the total opposite of how Aaron Tveit and Tom Wopat (Abignales Jr. and Sr.) play their roles, which is entirely with a rocky, unflinching surface that puts all the work on their voice -- beautiful tenor and solid baritone, but as emotionally flat as the rest of the show. (To be fair, Tveit may be held back by the show: he nails his final song, "Good-Bye," in which reality catches up with his character -- the first time he's ever really tested.)

Perhaps the biggest flaw of the show is the structure, which insists on reminding the audience that it's a musical. When The Drowsy Chaperone breaks the fourth wall, it's to welcome you to a world of imagination; when Catch Me If You Can does, it's because it can't find any other way to frame the narrative. At least the former knew that it was an homage to classic archetypes and melodies; it's unclear what the latter thinks its doing when three members of the chorus sing a quick ditty while dressed up as Frank's trusty scissors, India ink, and glue. It's one thing to paint neon targets on the backs of some dancers so as to morph scenery into a song; it's another to trot out dancing girls in wreathes for "Christmas Is My Favorite Time of Year," or are not supposed to be taking any of this seriously?

They say that all criminals secretly long to be caught, so perhaps that's why Catch Me If You Can keeps daring the audience to notice how cheap and tacky it is. (Or is the two-dimensional "plane" that swings down in the background supposed to make Frank's forged Pan Am license seem more authentic by comparison?) If that's the case, consider this show a success . . . in that enough people have caught on to its mediocrity: the show closes September 4th.

THEATER: Red Cloud Rising

2011-08-07T11:24:00.002-04:00

Who is Charlotte Gaffney, and why is she trying to get me to work as an analyst for Bydder Financial? You pause for a moment, scratching your head, pouring over your e-mails, and then you remember: some time ago, you signed up for an interactive theater experience called Red Cloud Rising, which purports to be a friendlier, safer, communal version of that Michael Douglas film The Game: might this be it? So it is that you dress comfortably for your "job interview," heading down to the Financial District to meet the other potential inductees. Across a conference table from them (in my case: a reporter, Samantha; two friends, Wendy and Zahra; and an Australian tourist, Cristian), Ms. Gaffney gives you a little background on your new, potential employer -- which you'll want to pay close attention to, given that there's no director nor lighting cue to keep you focused -- before sending you on a "team-building" exercise designed to test your qualifications.

This is no mere scavenger hunt that has you searching graveyards, park benches, and laundromats, however: before long, you'll encounter a conspiracy theorist, Rene, who seeks to recruit you to another organization, Red Cloud, that wants to reveal the "truth" about bottom-line oriented corporations, the sort who manage to sell a country its own natural resources, or which makes its products with ever more cut-rate ingredients. No, under the watchful eye of creator Gyda Arber (who has been running the "You Are the Star" multimedia noir adventures that go by the Suspicious Package moniker), you'll spend the day receiving cryptic text messages and suspicious (and sometimes hard to hear) phone calls that provide you with just enough information to get you to the next location (or "scene").

As a work of pure theater, it's perhaps too diffracted -- there's a lot of walking and talking amongst yourselves, and there are a few technical difficulties that sometimes lead to confusion -- but so far as entertainment goes, it succeeds as an actual team-building event. It's a technologically updated version of Accomplice: New York, another theatrical walking-tour experience. The largest difference between them is that Red Cloud Rising is the more ambitiously plotted (and affordable), whereas Accomplice is slightly more engaging (and filling); both are well worth doing, though not on the same day. The real asset to Red Cloud Rising, however, and this speaks to Ms. Arber's experience as a director, is in the way it will transform the way in which you view its slice of the city -- which is ostensibly what theater's meant to do in the first place. This sort of site-specific engagement, which encourages Internet-based world-building outside of the show (which is already out of the theater), speaks to a very bright future of theater.

THEATER: Brain Explode!

2011-08-02T03:29:00.000-04:00

Photos/Kimberly Craven

"Ray Pinter has a problem," reads the mocked-up Infocom-esque box art to the live interactive-fiction hybrid Brain Explode! "In sixty minutes, his brain is going to explode." His problem is our present, for the show -- written by Stephen Aubrey, Danny Bowes, and Richard Lovejoy -- is a lovingly (and painstakingly) crafted homage to both games and theater, a genuinely immersive experience that's leagues ahead of Sneaky Snake's previous foray into this field. (In geek theater parlance, Brain Explode! is to Adventure Quest as the Wii is to the Nintendo Entertainment System. The original one.)

The "gimmick" -- though one hesitates to call it that, justified and critical as it is to the story -- is that after a Tron-like accident at a life-changing game-design conference, Ray (Stephen Heskett), finds himself trapped within his own game, and it's up to the audience to guide him to the exit . . . before the chip implanted in his head causes his brain to explode. But this isn't simple problem-solving: Ray's goal was to design a truly interactive work of fiction, in which you could ask the computer to do anything, without ever being limited by the phrase "I don't know what you mean" or "I can't do that."

The result, then, allows six volunteers to fool around with Ray's life as much as they'd like. For example, the evening I attended the show, the audience had spent nearly thirty minutes encouraging Ray to perform with greater than usual charisma, providing him with basic psychoanalysis, and referring to him as "Storm King," before finally figuring out how to open the locked door. Did they then instruct him to walk through said door? No, they did not. Instead, they threw object after object through the open door, much to Ray's increasingly snarky (and incredibly well ad-libbed) disapproval. (Most impressive is the way Heskett spent much of this scene with a blanket wrapped around his fist and a purse clutched in one arm -- because the audience had never countermanded their instructions for him to do so in the first place.) Such was the genius of the show, for while it had a clear structure -- and a literal countdown clock -- it refused to be bound simply to the scripted scenarios: it might point, push, and eventually prod the players in the right direction, but it wouldn't force anything to occur. Whatever happened, happened: Will Wright would be proud; there are even alternate endings (four in all) depending on the audience's progress (and morality).

The show skews toward comedy (as most semi-improvisational shows do), and in a nod to the necessities of plot, each of the three interactive scenes (represented as "puzzle rooms" from which our hero is attempting to escape) provides the audience with less and less freedom. (Ray begins in an open room, spends some time on a closed boat, and is then chained to a table.) And yet, the creativity of these three writers, and the confidence of their director, Paige Blansfield, is such that you'd never notice it in the moment: the two hours of Brain Explode! (there are some untimed scenes) fly by faster than a marathon session of, say, Plants vs. Zombies. The difference here, of course, is that Brain Explode! does more than distract you as it introduces new elements of "gameplay" (theaterplay?): it aims to teach us, through Ray, about ourselves: Jesse Wilson shows up as all the male figures in Ray's life (distant father, deceased brother, former best friend) and Megan Melnyk plays Ray's hyperactive mother and steadfast yet steely girlfriend. (To say nothing of the puppets and robots designed by Jim Hammer and Marc Borders.) Winning involves more than solving puzzles; it requires empathy.

Special above-and-beyond credit also goes to Sneaky Snake for their dramaturgic commitment: the program's worth saving, from the retro design to the five-page "excerpt" from an 1987 Computing World article about Pinter, a gem that discusses both the failed interactive fiction adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses and provides an example of Pinter's successful first game, Perilton, which was known for its elaborate death sequences: "You are stabbed by the bear and the samurai. Repeatedly. They seem to be intentionally avoiding vital organs...," begins one, before relating the long chain of events in which your near-dead body is possessed by a ghost which flings you onto sharp rocks in the ocean from which a shark devours you before being caught up in a hurricane and being subsequently used as target practice by a fireball-casting wizard. If that fails to convince you of the incredible love put into Brain Explode!, then you might as well shut down your heart right now; as for me, I'll be standing in a room with exits to the north, south, and southwest, waiting patiently, desperately, for this show to be remounted.

metaDRAMA: Long Absence, Eh?

2011-07-23T09:26:00.000-04:00

I am still here, if you were wondering. After a crushing year of semi-employment, the new job I've started has left me with less time to get to the theater (and even less to write about it), and because I respect the shows I'm seeing too much to half-ass my reviews of them, I've stepped back momentarily to regroup.

But just because I've been missing the Comic Book and Video Game festivals at The Brick, or the return of the PTP/NYC project at Atlantic Stage 2, the work currently being done at the cell, or any number of the other terrific things that have passed by, doesn't mean that you have to, so while I hope to start getting fresh reviews out by the start of the Fringe festival, that smorgasbord of entertainment (which includes some returning hits, like Nosedive's "Infectious Opportunity"), I'm going to start posting some previews/recommendations, too, based on the releases I get.

Also, in the interests of getting back on a regular posting schedule, I'm going to be taking all that non-theater-y "short-a-day" work that I've been doing and porting it over to a WordPress site (http://shortaday.wordpress.com/), which will also give me the opportunity to figure out the best blogging format to continue reporting through. If you've got any other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

Oh, and television reviews for Rescue Me and Torchwood are up, if you're interested.

THEATER: Zarkana (Cirque du Soleil)

2011-06-30T09:01:00.002-04:00

Forget, for a moment, the sight of a man climbing and balancing atop an unsupported ladder, and draw your eyes -- if you can -- away from the woman who scales his back and places a second ladder atop his shoulders before ascending and doing a hand stand from those towering heights, an aesthetically pleasing/terrifying feat of human architecture. The act itself is no doubt impressive -- that almost goes without saying for Cirque du Soleil -- but what's truly astonishing about the talent in Zarkana is how much of it creator François Girard simply throws into the background without comment or spectacle: those who cross from one side of the stage to the other whilst balancing on an overly large ball or spinning a narrow hula hoop around their knees. It demonstrates what might as well be the company's mantra -- "This is not enough" -- in that every time you think you've seen it all, with the large ensemble hanging from the walls and spiraling upside down from the ceiling, the stakes and sights are raised.

From a storytelling perspective, Zarkana is a beautiful, well-intentioned mess, but unlike, say, Spiderman, Girard (who writes and directs) is under no obligation to make the threads cohere. Personally, I could do without quite so much sensory overload, with additional "cast" members filling out the ensemble on gigantic video screens, but then again, this is supposed to be a circus. Besides, it is in part all of that chaos that helps us to really focus on the death-defying stunts (after all, even as we hold our collective breath, time and time again, we all survive). When Maria Choodu floor juggles seven balls, ricocheting them beneath cabinets or while climbing a narrow staircase, the supporting players freeze in support; it's only when Carole Demers finishes her flips and lands atop the rubbery Russian bar (a two-man-supported springboard) that the rest of the cast resumes their own smaller-scale acrobatics. There's only one ill-conceived piece, involving Cyr wheels (which actors spin within) and aerial hoops, in which so much is happening that none of it has the opportunity to truly impress us.

On the other side of the curtain, opening Act Two, there's yet another example of what makes Cirque du Soleil stand out as a boundary-pushing ensemble. With both feet planted firmly on the floor, using nothing more than her dexterity and skillful hands, Erika Chen uses sand to paint over a transparency projector, quickly assembling scenes related to Zarkana's "story." It's a brilliant and measured demonstration of how true art comes both from space and the absence thereof, and a reminder of just how much there is to admire and appreciate beyond the stunt-for-stunt's-sake. The same can be said for Anatoly Zalevskiy's hand balancing, both a distilled feat of gymnastics and an astonishing show of singular strength.

That said, the heart- and showstopper in Zarkana revolves around a device that's so impressive it makes the solid trapeze work that precedes it look almost perfunctory. This so-called "Wheel of Death," in which Ray and Rudy Navas Velez perform in tandem, starts out simply enough, with the brothers each in their own wheel, using their weight and kinetic energy to spin the centrally-connected wheels high into the air and then back down to earth (like a man-powered Ferris wheel). But once the entire structure is spinning and the two climb atop the wheels, playing catch-up with the machine's rotational force and then taunting it as they do so blindfolded, or while jumping rope -- it's spectacular. It's even more impressive when you factor in the Velez's earlier work (joined by another brother, Rony, and Roberto Navas Yovany) on the high wire: some people, perhaps, are at their most comfortable suspended in mid-air.

So far as the audience goes throughout Zarkana, we, too, are at our most comfortable suspended in disbelief, marveling not so much at the magician Zark's addled quest to recover his lost love, nor the songs he sings to snake- and spider-women along the way (impressively attired as they all are), but at the scope of the work, work that -- most impressive of all -- manages to fill both the enormous Radio City space and our small, tightly wound hearts. This is full-frontal escapism, and amid the Banquine and flag acts (one with twirling people being tossed, the other with butterflying flags), the twirling rope dancers, and, yes, the obligatory clowns, I can't think of a better way to currently lose yourself at the theater.

THEATER: The Germ Project

2011-06-21T08:42:00.002-04:00

Photos/Jim Baldassare

It's generally a pleasure to attend something produced by New Georges: whether it works or not, it's fascinating. More importantly, it's always challenging and, in some cases, a literal roll of the dice, as with Lynn Rosen's Goldor $ Mythyka: A Hero Is Born, which tells the story of two middle-of-nowhere people, Bart (Garrett Neergaard) and Holly (Jenny Seastone Stern), who escape into the world of D&D and, later, bank robbery. Her play -- a mash-up of past and present, real and unreal -- is spun to an up-tempo beat by a DJ (Matthew-Lee Erlbach), the contemporary theater's version of a narrator, and Shana Gold's deft direction seems as fueled by love as the main characters do. But then their origin story ends, with a federal officer (Danny Wolohan) on their trail; Holly's mother, Gerri (Maggie Bofill), against them; and a mysterious Boy (Thomas Pecinka) potentially role-playing all of it . . . because New Georges hasn't produced a full play; instead, they're staging four hybrid workshop/excerpt premieres, which they call "germs."

It's a wild idea, but it feels more like an audition or a reality competition -- which of these will be American's Next Best Theatrical Experience? -- than a night of theater, less of what they've called The Germ Project and more The Germ Experiment. Why not mount all four plays in a small festival, as Clubbed Thumb does with their annual Summerworks series -- which also showcases daring, original works -- or have artists premiere their work in festivals designed for radical new material, like the Ice Factory, or the Incubator series? Yes, it's true that all four "germs" creatively use the same set (echoes abound throughout) and they probably save some money by double-casting the actors, but at the same time, that also means that each plays loses some of its exclusivity, its uniqueness, and moreover, its specificity. While there's still plenty of value in the project as a whole -- mainly in New Georges' unconventional commitment to staging these plays -- much of it goes unfulfilled.

Goldor $ Mythyka closes the evening, largely because its semi-episodic nature allows it to have a partial ending (one of those To Be Continued season finale sorts). But not so for Anna Ziegler's Evening All Afternoon, which focuses on an adrift Domanique (Bofill), who has come to America with Mickey (Juan Javier Cardenas) and their daughter, Luiza (Charise Castro Smith), but whose heart is still in the Dominican Republic, with her former lover, Ramon (Jorge Chachon). The man she's employed to care for, Mr. Esterman (Peter Levine), is lost in his own memories -- he once played basketball, he dreamed of being a poet -- and the play flutters gently between all the various defining moments in their lives, particular those of Luiza, who may be repeating her mother's "mistakes" by getting together with a poetic hoodlum, Fernando (Chachon). However, the kicker of poetry, according to Mr. E., is that "you have to focus on the beginning and end of the line . . . it's all about beginnings and endings," and due in part to Beatrice Terry's wonderfully calm direction, there is no ending to this germ.

The other two excerpts are more of a mixed bag. Kathryn Walat's This Is Not Antigone is insistent about something, but not its title -- while Anne (the terrific Anna Kull) may not be Antigone, her choice of tunic (albeit with an orange hunting vest over it), references to an oracle and the god Artemis, and initial disruption of a burial, suggest otherwise, and it's a mystery as to where the play is going, and why. Director Portia Krieger pulls out all the stops to distract us, working from Walat's hyperactive script, but even Anne's sister, Jackie (Jackie Chung), ends up interrupting her own dance-fueled monologue to bring the house lights up for a moment, reminding us that this isn't her story (and making us wonder whose it is). There are dramatic moments -- Anne's new guardian, Karl (Wolohan), getting into a drunken pissing contest with his son, Anne's boyfriend, Damon (Thomas Pecinka) -- but they don't go anywhere.

This aimlessness is even more visible in Kara Lee Corthron's drug-fueled Alicegraceanon, which attempts and fails to use its 60's setting as an excuse for this. Here, Corthon literally squeezes three plots into one space, running them in parallel (with occasional overlaps): Grace (Carolyn Baeumler) is the angry lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, who talks to a stuffed teddy bear that represents Jerry Garcia; Alice (Chung) is a young British girl from the 1860s who finds herself trapped in her pedophile friend Charles Dodgson's fantasy (you may know him better as Lewis Carroll); and Anonymous (an impressive Stern), a young runaway who keeps a diary of her many new drugged-out experiences. The characters have little in common, save for their sparks of rebellion, so when the excerpt ends with a reality-shattering earthquake that causes them to meet, it leads more to confusion than intrigue, and there's the sense that, as with The Germ Project's four plays, any single one of these narrative threads would have been stronger on its own.

THEATER: Our Lot

2011-06-20T02:06:00.004-04:00

Photo/Carl Skutsch

The moment we are born is the moment we start forgetting. It is our lot to walk through life unaware of what we've lost, or worse, as in the case of Stig (Paul Neibanck), who suffered brain damage and is now a wild, forever-fourteen-year-old adult, to remember our loss. In Kristin Newbom and W. David Hancock's engrossing memory play Our Lot, Stig, his two sisters Kathy (Joanna P. Adler) and Alice (Mariann Mayberry), have gathered to fumigate their childhood home and throw away the boxed and labeled memories hoarded by their late step-father-slash-uncle, Karl. As with many memory-driven plays, the homefront is steeped in a miasma of misplaced miseries, which is why the youngest, Kathy, is keeping up her steely all-business front, wanting nothing more than to be done with the past. On the other hand, the selfish middle child, Alice, who "escaped" the homestead, rubs salt in old wounds by dwelling on her more rose-tinted remembrances, as desperate to save her mother's old Instamatic camera as Kathy is motivated to destroy it. These two represent the future and the present, the superego and ego, while Stig, who has never grown up and cannot control his impulses, is the group's id and its past, the boy who neither condemns the mother for leaving (Kathy) or understands (Alice), but believes that she is just around the corner, living with a second family, ready to come home and collect him. Finally, there's Kathy's wheelchair-bound boyfriend, Toby (Nathan Hinton), who provides the audience with an outsider's neutrally "know-it-all" perspective.

This may seem too carefully structured, but Our Lot wisely takes a casual approach to its intellectual design: the play's philosophy comes madly scrawled on the inside of long-sealed plastic storage bins or as quotes from each bin's celebrity subject, from John Wayne to Lennin [sic]. Save for an ill-advisedly mystical ending (which only even bothers to wrap up one small part of this wide-open character study), the play alternates between the aggressive joshing of The Amoralists or Adam Rapp and the relaxed solipsism of Annie Baker, Adam Bock, and other hyperrealists. Instead of wrapping riddles in nutshells, Newbom and Hancock lovingly unwrap memories: a container labeled Jackie O. contains what's supposedly the black box from John-John's downed plane; instead, it's the family's long-lost copy of Back to the Future, which reminds Kathy of her divorce, and, in turn, this remembered rage summons an image of their mother's "Mister Misty" fits, which culminated in her throwing the kitchen table at her husband and abandoning them. Because Our Lot has such a strong central action -- the need to clean the house before the bank repossesses it and penalizes them -- it's able to go off on these thought tangents while maintaining its momentum. (Director May Adrales deserves some credit for this; the stage may be cluttered, but the action is always neat.)

As part of Clubbed Thumb's annual Summerworks series, Our Lot is a solid entry with a talented four-person cast, particularly Adler, whose measured tightness provides the show with much of its backbone and maturity. But as a part of the entire season, Our Lot's decidedly low-key approach and wide-netted structure may not be memorable enough to leave audiences with anything more than a warm impression, for while it's terrific moment to moment, those moments are, as we've learned, what we're constantly forgetting.

THEATER: Any Night

2011-06-19T01:46:00.057-04:00

Considering that the writers of Any Night are also its stars, the sleepy-eyed theatergoers who stagger out of the cavernous Laba Theater are bound to wonder if there's much of a line between the actors and their characters. Is Anna the sleepwalker who wakes up fondling knives, breathing ghost-movie-style into mirrors, and taking a medication that does nothing to keep her from stupid activities like driving or dancing while asleep -- or is it Medina Hahn, foolishly acting in her sleep? Is Patrick the intrusive upstairs neighbor/voyeur who wants to take her out on a date, or is that Daniel Arnold, hoping to exploit an embarrassing condition for financial and sexual gain? Massive plot holes aside, the fact that Hahn and Arnold are delusionally determined to tour this painfully flimsy show (and adapt it to the screen) makes them simultaneously perfect for these roles . . . and unwittingly awful in them. Here's a backhanded compliment: they're too earnest for the schlock they've written. They honestly seem to think that the mere use of Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)" will deliver the suspenseful atmosphere they're aiming for.

At least the writers can chalk this up to a misguided passion project; what's the excuse of Ron Jenkins, who had previously decently directed Bash'd? Is it that he's so disgusted by the project that he does the bare minimum (so as to claim a paycheck), or is his spine currently on vacation? Evidence points both ways: he does nothing with Peter Porkorny's generic set (a bed bedecked by two giant curtains) and may even worsen it by failing to set out clear dimensions in which to have the action occur. And while David Fraser comes up with a neat single-strobe lighting effect in order to "blink" between reality and dream, Jenkins forgets to have this designer do anything else -- unless you think that Anna's basement apartment looks the same at daybreak as a Greek lip-synch parlor does at midnight. As for the actors themselves, Jenkins endorses their bad habits: Arnold keeps lapsing into his Canadian accent and Anna does far too much "interpretive" dance (which wouldn't be so noticeable if she were actually a good dancer); he does the same for Erin Macklem's costumes, which uncreatively and distractingly keep Anna in pajamas and keep putting Patrick in an evil-looking red hooded jacket.

In any case, and here there be spoilers, Any Night's most insurmountable problem remains its plotting. The play ambiguously opens in the future, the past, or a dream, as Anna lies bleeding in the arms of a stranger, whispering about how "One of you will die, and one of you will die inside," then immediately reveals it to be the future, for the play has now jumped to Anna's first encounter with Patrick, from whom she is renting an apartment. "Have I met you before?" she asks, strongly hinting at what the unshocking revelation that Patrick has met her sleepwalking self before, and long before Hahn and Arnold make the laughable choice to send her to a psychic (played, even more laughably, by Arnold), it becomes clear that Patrick is doomed. This, in turn, saps all the suspense from his diabolical schemes . . . schemes which, in fact, are just vouyeristic: he tapes and edits images of her "sleeping" and sells it on the Internet. (I'm going to take their word for this; I'd rather not dumb myself down any further by researching the sleep-porn industry.) If there's a twist -- and, as staged, that's debatable -- it's that it is Anna's "dream" personality who figures out Patrick's plan and that when Anna realizes "she" has killed him, it "kills her" inside, leading to her meaningless (but convenient) car crash, which all too neatly wraps around to where the play began . . . which is fitting, since Any Night never actually goes anywhere.

Unfortunately for the audience, the play is not merely a bad dream (though this unthrilling thriller may unwittingly put you to sleep): it's eighty minutes that you will never get back. In a world filled with far more entertainingly delusional people, this may be one of the rare cases where I can honestly recommend Charlie Sheen's Two and a Half Men as a better use of your time.

THEATER: Ajax in Iraq

2011-06-11T11:35:00.000-04:00

Photos/Isaiah Tanenbaum

Every year, there's a so-called exposé on the traumatic aftereffects of war, as if that grim fact were news. The truth is that as we shift from stones to clubs to spears to swords to cannons to muskets to machine guns to gas to bombs, we're only changing the type of destruction, not the results. The only difference between the stresses placed on Greek soldiers at the siege of Troy and those placed on American ones in Iraq is that the Greeks blamed insanity on the gods. In Ellen McLaughlin's Ajax in Iraq, Athena (Raushanah Simmons) gleefully brags to Odysseus (Mike Mihm) about the curse she's set against Ajax (a restrained Stephen Conrad Moore); when the script switches to its contemporary parallel, we're left to figure out what's reduced AJ (the excellent Christina Shipp) from a front-line hero, paving the way for her female peers, to a sleep-starved depressive: it's not until late in the play that we'll meet her abusive commander (Joshua Koopman), a man that we can all agree is crueler and closer than any "god" of war.

When focused on these not-so-distant echoes between wars, McLaughlin succeeds in showcasing the mental strain and suffering that all wars share in common. Unfortunately, as with many collaboratively written plays (the first draft was developed at the ART Institute in 2009), the concept is quickly overwritten and repeated. Instead of focusing on her characters and building out from their unique situations, she shifts into docutheater mode; six unnamed soldiers (Mihm, Chinaza Uche, Sol Crespo, Lori E. Parquet, Tiffany Clementi, and Koopman) go through a litany of familiar complaints about the Iraq War. Some of them are awkward ("It's this feeling of all of us, the Iraqis and the American soldiers, we're all being just hung out to dry"), while some of them aim for poetry: "What I can't get a handle on here is the time. It just doesn't go by. When you're being mortared, the seconds happen so slowly that they expand to where you can walk around in each one of them like it's a cathedral."

From a dramaturgic perspective, this is all interesting and perhaps necessary, given the lack of adult education and the steep divide between those in the military and those not; it may be useful to be hit over the head with how little America learned from the previous creation/occupation of Iraq, courtesy of Gertrude Bell (Anna Rahn) and a British captain (Matthew Archambault): "Military occupations go wrong, they just do. Even when they begin with the best of intentions." But it's not as effective as the less-direct, casual (and causal) scenes that focus on AJ's peers, particularly her best friend, Connie Mangus (Chudney Sykes). You can feel the tension when it's not being discussed, see it in the way that Mangus and her buddies play five-card stud with worn, sandy cards and bullets for chips. Ask yourself which is a more convincing argument against gender stereotypes: examples quoted in a professor's careful lecture or a sloppy group of soldiers sitting around in their fatigues, joking about their horrible childhood fashion senses (cowboy boots and a dashiki), laughingly throwing sexist jokes ("Gotta be a bitch, a whore, or a dyke") back at their male counterparts.

Despite the erratic pacing and occasionally overwrought examples, Ajax in Iraq is potently directed by August Schulenburg, whose similarly styled The Lesser Seductions of History makes him particularly suited to this role. Likewise, Flux Theater's new emphasis on aesthetics -- which only really began with this year's productions (the cluttered attic of Jacob's House, the marvelous live-in cart of Dog Act) -- takes some of the emphasis off the script. Will Lowry's set effortlessly merges the two main eras of the play, with a bloody tent sandwiched by strong stone columns, some shattered, some standing. The floor is a map of the Middle East, in which sand has carefully been raked into a landmass, the Tigris and Euphrates furrowed through it, and this makes its arbitrary creation/destruction all the more blatant as actors stomp, crawl, and kick through it. Sandbags wave hauntingly from hooks in the ceiling, spare cots (and sleeping soldiers) line the visible backstage areas (Ajax, providing a peek behind the "facts" and the histories of war). It is timeless stuff: everything that has happened is happening again, and Schulenburg makes some marvelous pictures (using striking, jagged angles) when staging the overlapping scenes, such as when Tecmessa (Parquet), Ajax's wife, speaks alongside a therapist's patient (Clementi), both in fear of how the war has changed their husband. At the very least, scenes that feel out of place -- like a description of how NVGs (night vision goggles) make the soldiers feel like they're in a dream -- look good.

Facts and research have their place, and that's generally on a poster-board outside the theater or inserted in the program. (To Flux's and dramaturg Heidi Nelson's credit, they have both of these, too.) For McLaughlin, they keep getting in the way. The show's climactic Maori war dance climax is impressive, particularly as it stands in ironic contrast to Ajax's eruditely written rage, but these sequences are followed by what feels like a PSA: "I'm here to speak to you today on behalf of the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans and the more than a million homeless veterans living in the USA today." AJ and Ajax aren't homeless (to the end they're pursued by their friends and family); they're depressed. The same goes for the overstuffed finale: instead of simply splitting the eulogy between Athena and Mangus, McLaughlin has two soldiers, Pisoni and Sickles, hastily debate the pros and cons of suicide. There's a great play in Ajax in Iraq, but as hard as Flux has tried, it's up to McLaughlin to chisel off the excess and polish it into the cautionary statue it longs to be.

THEATER: Standards of Decency 3: 300 Vaginas Before Breakfast

2011-06-03T01:34:00.000-04:00

I'll bet you three hundred people click the link to this review before breakfast, whether they're looking for vaginas, breakfast, or both, the final choice being the pornographic Meal of Champions for John Mayer, whose words were the inspiration for this, the third year of Blue Coyote Theater Group's exploration of modern sex: Standards of Decency. Part of the cleverness of the title, beyond its Google-ratings (note, that's G-rated, not rated G), is that it speaks to the unspeakability of certain acts that, in the Internet age, are now ever more possible and (possibly) ever less satisfying.

The woman (Rachel Craw) of Jordan Seavey's futurist-titled "any one: seven or so touches in ten or so minutes" comes into contact with strangers all day -- be it her surprisingly straight hairstylist (David Sedgwick) or touchy female yoga instructor (Katie Hayes) -- but ends by blogging in her underwear, alone, about her desire to just be touched. In Adam Szymkowicz's "300," which directly riffs on Mayer's line, Minnie (Stephanie Willing) attempts to get her boyfriend Hal (Charlie Wilson) to talk about his sexual history by throwing a PowerPoint presentation of desensitizing vaginas at him, then tries to stay cool as he reveals an increasingly exotic past, from consensual bestiality to male-on-male group sex at the whims of his temporary slave-master or roadie-work for an all female ska band.

We can so easily get information -- and videos -- that it's literally changing the way we think about sex, or so a teacher (David Lapkin) learns when he finds himself defending a student that has written a book report based, erroneously, on the porn version of Wuthering Heights. (He gloms onto this after noting that one character is now named "Heathclit.") To the child's mother (Katherine Puma), whom he once awkwardly dated, he now finds himself trying to justify porn: "Sometmies you don't want 'challenging,' you don't want difficult or messy. You want a simple-non-reality that you can end or begin at whim." The name of this piece, naturally, is "Romance," and it's strongly written by one of the two female playwrights in the group, Jacqueline Christy. In a nifty and hilarious gender-reversed piece, Matthew Freeman presents "The Metaphor," in which a self-abusing masturbator, Rob (Matthew Trumbull), is the one trying to convince his female priest, Lori (a very comic Amanda Jones), that what he's doing is wrong. ("Jesus is a metaphor," she retorts, welcoming him to the 21st century; "God doesn't care about websites.")

Some pieces are less thoughtful than others: in "Camera Four," Cheri Magid takes the honorable role of the "serious" playwright in the group, and writes of a security guard, Osborn (Christopher Nunez), who catches one of his tenants, Ms. Langan (Lauren Balmer) engaging in some unhygienic outdoor activities. Sadly, the piece is filled with awkward pauses and a go-nowhere plot that only serve to emphasize the awkwardness of the moment. (Laughs were sorely needed.) The opposite goes for David Johnston's confusing "A Lesson," which favors ambiguity rather than explicitness, and features an out-of-control "vocal coach" (Jim Ireland). Stuck in the middle is David Foley's "Plato's Retreat," which creatively re-imagines Plato's famous cave as a basement with non-stop streaming porn flickering on the walls, but too tamely follows through, with a dry (and un-sexy) battle between truth-loving Sophia (Lauren Balmer) and artifice-obsessed Libida (Katie Hayes).

The strength of the evening, though, is in its openness to experiment. The two book-ending plays, "Bits" and "Date Night at Skintastic Dot Com" are polar opposites, but both get equal treatment. The first, by Bruce Goldstone, is an absurd, almost Beckettsian, number in which a computer's binary bits, bytes, and pixels hyperactively comment on their user's web browsing preferences. In under ten minutes, the four cells (Balmer, Willing, Wilson, and Alex Neher) go from enthusiastically crying "tit!" to questioning the gender politics behind Guatama Siddha's assignment of a circle to the concept of "zero." Meanwhile, Mac Rogers' "Date Night" is the most earnest and hopeful play of the evening, as Sam (Jeremy Plyburn) and Connie (Rebecca Comtois) vow to set aside their celebrity nip-slip e-business for one night, realizing that if they don't make time for their own relationship now -- if they live too much in the virtual fantasies -- they'll lose one another. Their plan? To have more-than-competent sex.

300 Vaginas Before Breakfast doesn't always succeed at the more-than-competent part -- in fact, it's often sloppy, particularly when Gary Shrader directs (Kyle Ancowitz and Robert Buckwalter are notably smoother). But the Blue Coyote Theater Group finds enough truth to justify the more artificially stimulating entertainments; we can excuse the occasional moments of buffering.

Short-a-Day: Tessa Hadley's "Clever Girl"

2011-06-02T01:59:00.001-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, June 6, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 7.

"I unbuttoned the skirt and stepped out of it, still staring at the book. Something had happened; I could see all of the elements of the problem differently now, as if they had arranged themselves naked under a bright light." A minute ago, the "sulky stepdaughter" Stella had been attempting to solve her physics homework, and Norbert had been attempting to help her. Though Nor doesn't particularly like Stella (he truly loves her "mum"), he recognizes, in the cool logic of the accountant, that the sooner she grows up, the more of her mother he'll have to himself. (This seems silly, considering that the mother's currently in the hospital, waiting out the high-blood-pressured final week of her pregnancy.) But that's not what this story's about: it's about building to this titular moment, the moment at which the girl, fed-up at being blamed for things she did not do, tired of this minor tyranny, decides to apply herself after all: to grow up.

And yet, I'll admit that there are long stretches in any Hadley story in which I'm not entirely sure what's going on, and I'm often too bored to attempt to suss it out. Here's the final paragraph:

At first this cleverness was like a sensation of divinity; then, after a while, it ate itself and I couldn't turn the mind-light off, couldn't stop thinking through everything, couldn't sleep. I saw Nor--and my mother and my school--as if they were tiny, in the remote distance. I believed that if I wanted to I could solve all the problems in the physics teacher's book. When eventualy sleep came, I seemed to hear the soughing of trees outside in the empty air. I understood all about those trees. I grasped what they were: how they existed and did not exist, how both contradictory realities were possible at once.

The reference to trees ties back to an earlier interlude in which Stella, having just been uprooted "from the center of Bristol to a suburb, a house in a new cul-de-sac called Beech Grove" befriends the girl next door, Madeleine (more out of boredom than actual interest), and invents an elaborate series of rites with which to appease the god of the beech trees that the developers have paved over in the name of progress and the community. But what such existential games and far-too-adult-for-a-young-first-person narrative have to do with Stella's actual growth? Lines like these don't exactly butter this story's very dry bread: "Outside time, after all, the vanished trees were still printed on the air somewhere."

Hadley's a clever writer herself, setting out with such confidence that, lost as I am, I still assume that she's got an actual story wrapped up in there somewhere, something about the tenuous relationship between a daughter, stepfather, and mother who each want to leave their own marks on the house and the town. (Well, perhaps not so much with the mother, who is mostly absent.) But I'm not convinced that she's a good writer: this marks the third of her New Yorker stories that I got little-to-no enjoyment out of. As with her other work, there are simply too many disconnected observations coupled with not enough concern for the story's arc, which lacks rising, falling, or climactic actions. You could pick up any paragraph and start spinning a story out of it: it's when you put them together than things get all confused.

Short-a-Day: Kate Walbert's "M&M World"

2011-06-01T00:51:00.000-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 30, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 30.

"The city erupts, oozes, overflows; everyone is outdoors, walking quickly or standing on the corner checking phones, dialling phones, speaking on phones." And there you have the rhyme and rhythm of Walbert's story -- quick, over-full sentences. Now, where's the reason? Showing the hustle and bustle of New York City isn't anything new, and gawking at the storefronts and people-seas, even from the perspective of Ginny's excitable children (Olivia and Maggie), isn't all that interesting.

The stylistic gist is that Ginny is swept away by the rapid-fire speed of the world, and Walbert spells it out literally, too: "But she is constantly out of time, losing track, forgetting. Sunday's Monday evening, then Wednesday disappears altogether. M&M World looms in the distance, the electronic billboard--'m&m's world'--as bright as a beacon." But Walbert's so insistent in her tone that she misses the opportunity to be a little inconsistent, that is, to show us the difference between Ginny's present pace and that of her calmer (and ironically actually at sea) past, when she traveled on a whale-watching trip through Patagonia. Instead, she winds up being inconsistent with the current character, to the extent that it's hard to define Ginny's actual priorities, particularly as the flashbacks attempt to turn this into a tale still haunted by the girls' father (who is absently noted as never more than "the girls' father").

The story fluctuates even in its own language:

Men and women she may or may not recognize—movie stars, rappers, models—loom above them, magnified a thousand per cent, their eyes the size of swimming pools, their teeth cliff walls she could hide behind or possibly dwell in, like the Anasazi, chiselling toeholds so she might scale down at night to forage.... Recently, a flock of plastic bags has caught in the spindly sycamore in front of their apartment, empty bags that inflate and deflate with the wind like marooned sailing ships.

One moment, we're dealing with the Anasazi, then with the cosmology of a plastic bag; one moment the language is quick and ordinary, the next it's alliteratively alluding to the "spindly sycamore." As much as you might admire the story's inability to stay still, you can't help but acknowledge the edges of that particular double-edged sword. Every time you stumble upon a phrase like "ubiquitous galoshes," you get stabbed once again. In between these two jagged poles, there are a few terrific moments of a mother's pure and unwavering concern/love for her children, and yet even these are near spoiled by out-of-nowhere poetry like "the catch of love unbearable."

It's the distraction technique, all the way down to the title, for this story is about everything but M&M World (or everything and M&M World), never mind that the mother's distraction doesn't gibe with her well-measured love for her children, the slow memory of a fading whale, the casual thought of her divorce (and the stifled emotions that go with that), nor the focused panic she experiences on the floor of M&M World when five-year-old Maggie -- as of course she must -- goes missing. If you'll accept this metaphor: the story works as well as product placement. The more intently aware you are of what the story's about, the less effective it is.

The final image of Walbert's story is a poignant one, but it's out of some other story, and the pieces that precede it now seem shoehorned (as fragments) into the early narrative in order to help things tie together: "She squats to zip the girls’ fleeces to their chins, to kiss their cheeks—their eyes still wet with tears—then pulls them close to her, again. How soon the whale dissolved into its darkening sea. How soon she was left at the side of the boat, alone." Was that what the story was about? I was promised M&Ms.

Short-a-Day: Ron Rash's "The Trusty"

2011-05-31T01:16:00.000-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 83.

The only problem with Rash's story is that it's a bit too reliable: from the moment we learn that Sinkler -- a "trusty" who is allowed to roam free in return for his hauling water (from wells at the neighboring farms) to the chained members of his hard-labor prison gang -- was arrested for scamming people, you can't help but look for the genre's all-too-familiar double-cross. It's awfully convenient, one thinks, that at the particular farm Sinkler winds up cadging water from, there's a young woman being oppressed by her older husband; moments later, this turns to suspicion: OK, why is this young woman being allowed to spend so much time with the sly young con man? When she's the one to suggest an escape plan for the two of them, the one who has played cold, then hot; dumb, then smart; soft, then strong, it's pretty clear where we're going. But they do say that half the fun's the journey.

Rash chooses to use a rougher dialect without bothering to explain certain expressions -- it lends a neat authenticity to the setting that distracts, in the most elegant of ways, from the mechanics of the plot. "He asked Vickery if someone could spell him, and the bull guard smiled" "plenty enough cush to get him across the Mississippi," and "Lucy Sorrell had given him the icy mitts, but he had a month to warm her up" are just a few examples of the sound of the piece. And unlike an earlier piece (David Means's "Tree Line, Kansas, 1934"), at least this one has a strong plot to hang its hat on. It is, in other words, enjoyable to read, even if it's not particularly telling or deep:

It would be another hot, dry, miserable day and he'd be out in it. At quitting time he'd go back and wash up with water dingy enough to clog a strainer, eat what would gag a hog, then at nine o'clock set his head on a grimy pillow. Three and a half more years. Sinkler studied the ridgeline, found the gap that would lead to Ashville.

No, this is a story that knows exactly what it's doing, and savors the telling of it. That sure hand is what allows the ending to remain satisfying, despite not being particularly surprising. Rash has many ways in which to describe Sinkler and Lucy's ultimate fate, but rather than being direct about it, he draws a closer bead on Sinkler's thought process and allows him to figure out where this is all going, ending the story just moments before the action actually occurs. It's a final glimpse into Sinkler's mind, and if it doesn't exactly deepen his character (who really only seems to exist to live free by his own rules), it does show us what it's like to have such a clever, doomed mind.

Short-a-Day: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "Medea"

2011-05-30T01:06:00.009-04:00

Originally published in Harper's, May 2011. Personal satisfaction rating (out of 100): 45.

[Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers]

"This is an awful story and it began with me taking a taxi," reads the first line, admitting from the get-go that it's taking a casual approach with terrible things. Had she chosen a title with less import than that of the standin for all scorned women, this story might have soared; instead, her Icarus is flat and grounded. There are no stakes, so the piece comes across as a lecture to the complainers of the world, like our narrator, who has chosen a "gentle proleterian" cabbie as her driver, ostensibly in the hopes that he will silently allow her to vent. Instead, he reminds her that "what I'd complained about was nothing, nothing at all compared with some of the things that happen. There was worse, much worse."

Petrushevskaya develops this character well, relying mainly on dialogue to show us a woman who puts her foot in her mouth with such regularity that she may as well be running a marathon on her tongue. Unable to remain quiet, she responds to the driver's warning that there are worse things out there by launching a lengthy monologue: "Oh don't tell me! A friend told me about a woman she'd gone to school with...." Instead of showing how much she understands of true suffering, she proves the opposite; she's lived such a sheltered life that the sight of an exhibitionist's "riches" inspire "horror" in her. And when the driver begins to relate his own, true horrors, our narrator stubbornly insists on cheering him up, as if to prove herself right by proving that the driver's complaints are no more serious than her own. When he tells her that he has not slept in a month, she replies "'The best medicine is valerian drops,' I told him, not knowing anything."

Hand in hand with the character development is the pacing of the story, which builds from her awful, thoughtless advice, to a series of emptier and more absurd responses. When the cabbie explains that his daughter died, she offers this: "For some reason I said, 'The hardest part is the first year. The first year is the hardest.'" When he begins to blame himself, she literally thinks to herself "What can you say" and then tries to explain that a friend's son committed suicide but that the friend got over it . . . until learning that it was actually murder. She points out that her friend eventually had another child, at which point we learn that the mother's in the asylum. More empty consolations follow, as do the cabbie's revelations: the mother's in the asylum because she killed the daughter. Oh, I do so enjoy watching characters attempt to remain polite long after the other person has stopped playing by the so-called "rules": it shows the line between real empathy and false interest.

Whether you feel comfortable calling this a story or prefer to label it a lesson, the punchline -- predictable as it may be -- is redeemingly subtle-savage. The taxi has arrived, but our narrator has not been able to extricate herself from the father's confession of guilt, and it is here that she becomes implicated herself. The cabbie ends with this: "'I just . . . my daughter and I . . . we didn't care about anything. I -- permitted myself a lot. It's my fault.'" Consider yourself warned, reader/passenger: make sure you properly prioritize the things you truly care about, without excess, lest truly horrible things befall them.

Short-a-Day: Stephen King's "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive"

2011-05-29T00:30:00.005-04:00

Originally published in The Atlantic, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 96.

Given that he's known best for his heavily plotted horror novels, and not for his characters, it's a pleasant surprise to see Stephen King writing in the vein of, say, T. C. Boyle, with this clear, crisp, and entertaining short that enjoys to play with its participants as much as with its language. Then again, perhaps it's not a surprise to find King in such a playful mood, considering that he wrote this story as the penalty for losing a sports bet with his son (who provided the title of the tale). Whatever the case, be it ripped directly from actual headlines or just dreamed up from them, King offers us two views of a horrendous car crash.

It opens first with Brenda: "BRENDA HITS PICK-4 FOR $2,700 AND RESISTS HER FIRST IMPULSE" blares the section header, which doubles as its first line. It's a winning opener, and quickly establishes her as the sort of desperately poor, single woman with multiple kids for whom $2,700 is a massive jackpot. This applies, too, to her best friend (only friend, emphasizes King) Jasmine, from high school, with whom she decides to head out on a Thelma & Louise-like "road trip" -- escapism at its finest, as if by speeding away (ostensibly to hit up their parents for cash) they can avoid their problems:

[T]hey are chanting ["road trip"] while the three kids bawl in Brenda’s Sanford apartment and at least one (maybe two) is bawling in Jasmine’s North Berwick apartment. These are the fat women nobody wants to see when they’re on the streets, the ones no guy wants to pick up in the bars unless the hour is late and the mood is drunk and there’s nobody better in sight.

Meanwhile, every other section follows Phil and Pauline, quickly introduced as "SO THESE TWO OLD POETS WHO WERE ONCE LOVERS IN PARIS HAVE A PICNIC NEAR THE BATHROOMS." They're well-off writers, on their way to give a poetry reading, and they can take the time to relax in the relative quiet of a roadside rest area, and have a custard-pie and red-tea picnic, the sort who flip a coin to decide which one gets to read the Times's Arts Section first and who make the poignant observations about Herman Wouk still being alive . . . even as the Brenda/Jasmine sections tarnish such shallow poignancy. Who the fuck cares about Herman Wouk, after all? That's the way in which King chooses to close his story:

Pauline is also a poet, and as such feels capable of answering the man in the language God speaks. “What the fuck does it look like?” she says.

This is as great a use of the split narrative as you're going to get, with priorities shifting mid-sentence and veering across the lanes of what had, up until then, been a rather tidy story. If we were in the laid-back Phil and Pauline camp before, we're now plunged into their own realizations: "The windshield disintegrates; glass pebbles sparkle for a moment in the sun and she thinks—blasphemously—beautiful." That word, blasphemous, is a perfect choice, and though only moments before she'd gladly skip the horrors of the Times's front pages for the trivial comforts of the Arts, she's now mutely horrified by the sight of bystanders showing up to take pictures: "The woman raises her own cell phone and takes a picture with it. Pauline Enslin observes this without much surprise. She supposes the woman will show it to friends later."

If you insist, you can criticize the flatness of some of the characterizations here: they're poor and, what's more, they're aware of how poor they are. But it's better to dwell on the creative ways in which King speaks toward their condition, specifically in the way they describe government money as a mirage: "Every time you see bright stuff, somebody turns on the rain machine. The bright stuff is never color fast." Color is a recurring theme between the two narratives; the two poor women (poor in both senses, then) see gray, whereas the poets -- who are old and literally gray -- surround themselves with a feast of colors. (It is the tragic news that is black and white.) No, King knows what he's doing, and if he takes a few shortcuts to get there, they are perfectly justifiable ones, ones that bring you highly opinionated, history-packed sentences such as these:

She’s seen a lot of that grayness lately. Here they are in a three-room third-floor apartment, no guy in the picture (Tim, the latest in her life, took off six months ago), living pretty much on noodles and Pepsi and that cheap ice cream they sell at Walmart, no air-conditioning, no cable TV, she had a job at the Quik-Flash store but the company went busted and now the store’s an On the Run and the manager hired some Taco Paco to do her job because Taco Paco can work twelve or fourteen hours a day.

And:

They smile into each other’s used faces. Although Phil has been married three times (and has scattered five children behind him like confetti) and Pauline has been married twice (no children, but lovers of both sexes in the dozens), they still have quite a lot between them. Much more than a spark. Phil is both surprised and not surprised. At his age—late, but not quite yet last call—you take what you can and are happy to get it.

Finally, for those of you who think -- as I often do -- that King is a hack horror writer, inventive in ideas but lax in execution, I'll close with these two fantastically descriptive lines:

"She opens one eye in a reverse wink that is amusingly seductive."
"He sees a shatter of taillight glass like a patch of strawberries. He sees a severed arm caught in a bush. In the flames he sees a melting baby seat. He sees shoes."

Short-a-Day: Mory Morris's "The Cross Word"

2011-05-28T17:56:00.001-04:00

Originally published in The Atlantic, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): -1 (i.e., offensive).

Not to sound like a snob, but once you start doing the upper-tier crosswords of The New York Times or the syndicated ones from CrossSynergy, or simply the ones edited by top-notch constructors like Ben Tausig (The Onion), Mike Shenk (The Wall Street Journal) or Patrick Berry (Chronicle of Higher Education), or the puzzles self-produced by the constructors who appear in those prestigious publications (Brendan Emmet Quigley, Patrick Blindauer, Matt Gaffney), it's hard to take the computer-generated slogs that litter the commuter papers seriously. (You can find some examples by following the puzzle links here.) And even in those good publications, the serious crossword bloggers, like Amy Reynaldo or (my former professor) Michael Sharp, note that there are a fair share of duds, most of which revolve around so-called "stunt" puzzles: puzzles that are notable not for their theme or their fill, but because of the quirks of their construction, such as a puzzle that uses only eight letters, or a puzzle that uses every letter in the alphabet . . . four times a pop (a quadruple pangram, not that these are all bad). I spend this time talking about crosswords -- which I'm not-so-secretly devoted to, and training myself to speed-solve (I'm now averaging about three minutes for the easiest, a Monday, and winnowing my Friday/Saturdays below the twenty minute mark) -- because about three "clues" into Mary Morris's "stunt" story, I realized that bad fiction shares a lot of the same flaws as a bad crossword puzzle. For instance:

Is the theme blatant and/or unoriginal?
Yes on both counts: in addition to her awfully punned titled, Morris throws the words RAGE, ANGER, WRATH and REVENGE, into her puzzle (randomly), and then, using the clues as section headers (that have little to do with the story that "ties" it all together), explains how Mickey (Michelle) grew to be jealous of her half-sister, Sara, who was beautiful and always got whatever she wanted, including the boy, Matt, that Michelle was in love with.
Is the story/puzzle sloppy in execution?
Not only is the story devoid of new ideas -- Sara is a drug-addict and Michelle covers for her as a child; when they grow up, she refuses to speak to her ever again (over the whole Matt issue), at which point Sara dies, and Michelle feels guilty, but also wrathful. We find this all out in the "clue" for 50D, Furious: "I am using the word was now because if you haven't guessed, Sara is dead. She died a month again. She was murdered, though at first the police thought it was 'by her own hand.'" This has something to do with the confession of a witness -- a pigeon-keeper, known in slang as a "mumbler" -- but given the abruptness of this message, it's nothing more than a gimmick once again, a spot of tragedy meant to give weight to a petty story. As for the puzzle, not only does it clue the word MEAN twice, but it's filled with crap like GIRO and TOPEE and MESSRS and TORI; the two longest entries are APOTHECARYSSHOP and TOTALITARIANISM, neither particularly noteworthy (or relevant).

I found myself scribbling down not the answers to the puzzle, but my objections to the story -- above all, the horror I took in realizing that I knew more about crosswords than Ms. Morris, who probably picked up everything she knows about the subject from the awful movie All About Steve (which, if I recall properly, was lambasted for the exact same reason: it didn't know what it was talking about). I mean, really, this girl's been solving puzzles since she was a kid, and she still can't figure out a three-letter word for "A pitching star"? And what rag of a paper would run a clue like "Baseball stat with a B in it"? It's almost horrific -- unintentionally awful, if you will -- the way in which Mickey boasts of her puzzle-making skills:

"I'm the person who brought you "The Wasp's Nest." What a brilliant puzzle that was. I loved the clues: "What comes in stripes." "Mystery meat." "On course." "Dole (not a pineapple)." "What you lose when you sell." (The answers: Seersucker. Roast beef. Par 3. Bob. Capital gains tax.) If only Will Shortz didn't mess with my clues.

So not only is the story bad and inaccurate: it's flat-out insulting. "Work is involved. I watch Sex and the City or Six Feet Under just to be able to answer clues. Ditto for Harry Potter. The wizard's name, the owl." The story isn't even timely about the ways in which it is wrong. You don't need to watch a show to answer a puzzle (that's why there are crossing entries), and you don't need to watch Harry Potter to know that the wizard's name is . . . Harry Potter. You'll excuse me for sniping minor points here, and it's not as if I can't just as easily critique the repetitions of the actual story:

She was going to go to L.A. She made up her mind before she was twelve. She'd get the hell out of Brooklyn. She was going to move out West and take a screen test with those violet eyes. She had all these plans.
In a few years I'm going to get out of here, she told me. I'm going to L.A. to become an actress. My dad is waiting for me. I know where he is. Her eyes got all glisteny when she said these things.

Gag me with a spoon: "glisteny"? What melodramatic, hacky, sub-workshop-level dialogue. What horrendous plotting. How did a cloying line like "Sara, the one puzzle I'll never solve" make it into the final draft? This is the story you want people to read in the slush pile before they pick yours up, the one that's so bad it makes everything else around it look good. Ultimately, Morris's story is a success for one reason, and for one reason only: while the story fails to communicate rage, and the puzzle fails to adequately clue it, the inept combination of the two absolutely provokes it in any reader with a modicum of experience in either fiction writing or crossword solving. I am more than cross; I am furious.

Short-a-Day: Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table"

2011-05-27T01:58:00.002-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 65.

Either I'm getting better at identifying excerpts passing as short stories or The New Yorker is getting less obvious about these fictional teases. I'm going with the latter for this one: the situation's inventive enough such that with a little trimming and focus, Ondaatje could have had a real winner on our hands. Instead, he seems unsure as to which story he wants to tell: so it is that we begin with a cryptic third-person present tense section and end with a first-person narrator remembering the funeral-at-sea of a rich stranger. What's working is the sense of openness that Ondaatje gives to a story that's stuck, for the most part, on a large six-hundred-plus-person boat, and which is predominantly about the coming-of-age of an eleven-year-old-boy. What's lacking is a singular perspective with which to filter all that raw data.

In no time at all, really, our protagonist finds himself abandoned (and abandoning) his poor relatives (he's never slept beneath a blanket), seeing and climbing aboard a ship for the first time, and setting out from Ceylon to England, where he will now live with the mother he never really knew. Though he describes himself as isolated, he strikes up friendships with boys who would have hated him back on the mainland -- "the quiet Ramadhin and the exuberant Cassius" -- as well as a tender and tenuous crush/connection with his distant female cousin, Emily de Saram, who is conveniently on the same boat. Though he is relegated to the worst table in the banquet hall, known by the eccentrics and poor as "the Cat's Table," he makes the most of his time, and the shift into the first person can be taken as the way in which he lays claim to his own life/destiny. Would that Ondaatje stuck with our hero, too: instead, he ends with the funeral of Hector de Silva; those wishing to know how this affected the boy -- who accidentally had a hand in the death, helping, as he did, to smuggle on board the dog that bit the cursed rich man's throat -- will have to tune in to the full novel.

The story works well when it's centered around this sneaky, cat-like kid, a scrappy yet wide-eyed boy struggling to find his place. His extra-early morning excursions into the first-class swimming pool with his unlikely mates "the quiet Ramadhin and the exuberant Cassius" are thrilling and the observations he makes about the psychic performer the Hyderabad Mind are interesting ("I had witnessed for the first time what took place behind the thin curtain of art, and it gave me some protection the next time I saw him on stage, decked out in full costume"). But the story can't decide if it wants to be about privilege and class, or even, really, which of its secondary and tertiary characters it wants to focus on ("[M]inor characters, there to witness how those with real power progressed or failed in the world"). It's well-written, nicely paced, but not entirely a short story . . . or at least, too much to be merely a short.

Short-a-Day: Donald Antrim's "He Knew"

2011-05-26T01:35:00.033-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 9, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 13.

"At the booth, he counted out pills, his anti-depressants and her anti-anxieties--he carried and dispensed for her more often than not, ever since her suicide attempt--and he asked her, 'How many do you think will do the trick?'"

What Antrim's really asking here, of the reader, is how many pills will it take for this story to jump from a light and uneventful Mid-Manhattan shopping stroll between two lovers -- an older, washed-up comic actor, and his younger, never-washed wife -- the sort of tale you might find in the Fashion Issue, into a tragic tale that represents the modern American condition. In my mind, there aren't enough pills in the world to doll this up: American problems are so slight and self-obsessive enough already that it's hard to write about them, particularly when you choose, as Antrim has, to have the narrative tone reflect that self-suffering gloss. (Far better to do as Jonathan Franzen does, writing around the situations so as to give us a fuller view, not of the problem, but of the roots and results.)

There's a nice moment in which the young wife frets about not fitting the Empire waist at Barney's ("It is my tits? Are my tits too small? Is that the problem?") and he comforts her by making a joke about her height -- a callback to the quaintly romantic way in which they first met -- and it looks as if we'll really learn something about these characters. But no; as it turns out, the story is vapid, and has merely been attempting to siphon off the vapors of a more serious subject. Worse, it is unconvincingly vapid: bland, unnecessary descriptions come at us in waves, telling without ever showing, all with an almost impressive lack of action and that distinctly indistinct (American) gloss: "The man was about thirty-five or maybe thirty-eight or -nine years old, forty or so, and his wife was coming up behind.... The man's wife looked plain, with short brown hair and a small chin, though, on the other hand, she was attractive."

Why include any of this? We get that both characters are medicated, each in their opposite way, but I don't need to read a fogged story to understand that. I don't need the story itself to put me to sleep. The title, "He Knew," bleakly hints that there's more beneath the half-fight that they get into on the Halloween-y streets of New York City, that there has been passion and will be passion, but that despite this, he knows that they're secretly doomed. He will not resuscicate his acting career; she will not get her nerves under control; they will not have a family; and the weight of maintaining this illusion is stifling them both. I say again: so what?

Short-a-Day: Sam Lipsyte's "Deniers"

2011-05-25T01:22:00.003-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, May 2, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 80.

A surprising, spry story about survivors: then and now. Mandy's father, a Holocaust survivor, opens the story with a bang: "Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut." You survived, in other words, by moving on and past it: denying, in a sense, what had been done to you. The more he dwells in the very real past, the further his wife gets from him, attending adult motels with a representative from Shell Oil, and so after she, depressed at the end of the affair, kills herself, he silently acknowledges the death and never speaks of it again. Now, in a nursing home, he still can hardly speak to his daughter about the past, his or theirs.

The daughter, meanwhile, suffers from her own memories, perverted or at least confused in many ways by all the silent denials; she winds up an alcoholic and a druggie, a victim of her own making. Her solution, unlike her fathers, is to ceaselessly talk about her problems -- in Anonymous meetings -- and to her friend, a liberal poetess who loves to absorb her anguish and wring it into verse. She winds up in a relationship with a tall man whose azure -- intensely blue -- eyes foreshadow his intensely Aryan origins, but after a liberating dream, she chooses not to flee from the former hatemonger, but to allow him to confess his sins: to speak, to not deny the past, but to move on in some middle ground. (All the while, however, thoughts of suicide -- her mother's abrupt note, "Oh shit," -- continue to flit through her mind, so perhaps this "peace" is untenable: maybe we can't deal with everything.)

What's lacking in Lipsyte's story (as opposed to last year's colorful "The Dungeon Master") is any real depth to his characters; neither Mandy nor her father develop very much, and the secondary characters -- the racist, the poet -- are rarely more than their occupations. And yet, he's a clever writer -- heavy-handed as an occasional consequence that I can more than live with -- and so I find myself nonetheless surprised by his flow and by his execution:

"She liked the way the purple fabric encased her, the sporty stink." A sporty stink is alliteratively playful, but also entirely accurate; we'll get a lot of mundane yet essential phrases like these.
"He spat out a word that sounded like 'shame,' but more shameful." There's plenty of repetition for emphasis as well. This is, like many post-Holocaust stories, as much about things that can be named as things that cannot.
"Other, more generous catastrophes would arrive.... She clutched the motel’s “Do Not Disturb” card for days." Generous catastrophies is a brilliant way of putting it -- life is filled with minute disasters -- but Lipsyte seals the deal by signaling Mandy's mother's end with that desperate description of a hopeless affair: "Do Not Disturb" indeed.
"Maybe once she’d dreamed of jazz-dance stardom, roses heaped on her Capezios, but keeping it real and teaching cardio ballet constituted triumphs enough." There's a nice balance in Lipsyte's structure, too: the way his sentences resemble their topics. In this sentence, we get the clash between basic, straight-talking language that "keeps it real" and the imaginary fancy of "roses heaped on her Capezios."
At other points, however, watch how he sticks to fragments: "An attendant came over, young, with cornrows, patted her father’s arm. His printer’s arm, shrunken."

I can't deny that this story kept me well and entertained.

Short-a-Day: Thomas McGuane's "The Good Samaritan"

2011-05-10T01:28:00.056-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 90.

What makes someone good? Barney, a temporary ranch-hand hired by an accidentally injured Szabo, is an efficient, respectable man who silently inserts himself into taking care of the work assigned him, slowly branching out to a brief affair with Szabo's somewhat lonely mother, and even going so far as to visit Szabo's federally imprisoned son, David. Though his odd involvement and direct -- offensively so -- talk throws Szabo, the man manages to improve everything he comes into contact with . . . right before he steals a valuable painting from Szabo's mother. On the other hand, Szabo's diligent, hard-working, and stagnant approach to life has led his ex-wife to take crazy risks (and eventually divorce him), leads his customers to think he's crazy, and has left his son feeling alienated . . . even though he regularly visits the prison, and makes it clear that David's always welcome to return home. Depending on the situation, any man can be good or bad, and even the theft of the painting isn't an awful thing -- he convinced the mother to purchase insurance.

McGuane's story reads smooth as butter, neatly introducing characters with only as much as is necessary at any given time (we don't learn much about Melinda until late in the story), and filling the story with unembellished details that sing in their ordinariness: "His mother sat in the living room doing Sudoku in front of a muted television, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth" and "He felt the significance of each step as he walked toward the tractor, marvelling at the sunlight on its green paint, its tires nearly his own height, its baler pert and ready." Note the relative lack of adjectives: there isn't a cluttered or confusing sentence throughout, though there are some winning colloquialisms. ("His late father, a hardworking tradesman, would have given Barney a wood shampoo with a rake handle.") Life comes as it comes to these folk, and Barney provides a good contrast between the simple people of the town who accept each new day with the grace of soaking in the sun and the "educated" people (he always claims to have a Ph.D.) who feel the need to keep claiming parts of the world as their own -- to name and to know, so to speak.

Plenty to enjoy in the awkward conversations shared between generations who are straining to see eye-to-eye, even as their priorities shift (at one point Szabo wishes he could fall easily into common anesthetics like television and NASCAR); plenty to think about in the moralities that are hinted at beneath the layers of simple banter and ordinary descriptions.

THEATER: The School for Lies

2011-05-02T05:29:00.001-04:00

The School for Lies, according to playwright David Ives (who is freely and triumphantly riffing off of Moliere's masterpiece, The Misanthrope), is just another way of describing polite society. It's because of this that Frank (Hamish Linklater), both in name and attitude, finds himself at odds with friends like Philante (Hoon Lee); romantic rivals like the pretentious poet Oronte (Rick Holmes), as-rich-as-he-is-stupid Acaste (Matthew Maher), and overstimulated Clitander (Frank Harts); and the woman of everyone's affection, the wry, witty, and widowed Celimene (Mamie Gummer). Thankfully, even the Franks (or Grinches) in the audience will have to admit -- without the need for poetic flattery -- that Ives, no stranger to wordsmithery, has struck comic gold with his playful adaptation. Additionally, while the play's set in the past -- if you trust William Ivey Long's bright and flowering period costumes -- the language goes wherever it needs to for a laugh, "urban" or "valley girl" or intentionally artsy ("You trust a fecaphile to smell your roses!"). Like Celimene's cousin, Elainte (Jenn Gambatese), you'll be so taken by the refreshing tone that you'll feel the urge to throw yourself at the play (which, to be fair, is pretty much what the full-bodied cast is doing).

The truth is, this production is so perfectly cast that Gummer comes across as the weakest of the bunch: she's surrounded by veterans like Alison Fraser, who writes on the floor in fits of hysteric "piety" as the hypocritical Arsinoe, and physical jesters like Steven Boyer (of Jollyship the Whiz-Bang), who plays two set-upon (and sometimes sat-upon) servants. And director Walter Bobbie, a long-time collaborator with Ives, does no wrong with this meaty script: he brings the antics of the staging (canapes everywhere!) up to those of the script, normalizing what might seem ridiculous; you can see the rhyming verses bouncing through the cast, particularly in Linklater, who at times seems to convulse his lines. Such direction has a charmingly disarming effect, for though School for Lies is (in more ways than one) a throwback, the breakneck pace makes it feel fresh and invigorating. (You might credit the farcical twists of the new ending, as well as the scaling back of the social satire in favor of insult-humor that's turned up to eleven.)

It's a good thing I don't have a copy of the script, or I might simply quote the thing at length, and such a fate might be all too cruel a tease for your theaterbuds (especially since tickets are bound to be difficult to find). Frank, who claims to work as a theater critic (and would make the world's worst), considers the empty words of friendship to be toxic, and he's not wrong; who, in this Facebook era, does not feel as "promiscuous as a bedpan"? But the solution isn't to shut it all down; it's to pick your words as carefully as Ives has, so that when you try to rave about the utter enjoyment of losing oneself in the words, you don't get lost in a lie.

Short-a-Day: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's "A Withered Branch"

2011-04-30T00:57:00.000-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, April 18, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 22.

[Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers.]

"I met my twin soul at dawn on a narrow street by the cathedral," writes the short-story writing protagonist of Petrushevskaya's piece. She has just arrived in Vilnius, and despite the narrow sexual escape of the previous night, in which her hitchhike-enabling trucker chooses not to rape her, she feels alive. She is open to the world, and in that light, she is welcomed by this "twin" -- "a modestly dressed woman of about fifty, wearing a kerchief," who offers, knowing that all the hotels are full, to let her stay in her home. She is greeted with dinner, given a spare key, treated kindly, and unlike your traditional short story, this does not end badly for either one.

As it turns out, the woman, Jadviga, is just looking for someone with whom she can talk. "She has been quiet, saying nothing to her new neighbors. They would never accept such tragedy, would shun her the way her old neighbors did in Panevezys." It's not clear how long she's been bearing this weight, and the cultural boundary between America -- which practical brags of its suffering -- and Russia makes it unclear if there's something else behind the loss of her husband, daughter, son, and son's husband in what appears to have been an accidental fire. The point, I guess, is that she's not accepted or that she feels unaccepted, and in that, our narrator can relate, for she has an asthmatic son (currently in a sanatorium) and a dead husband who was paralyzed for a fifth of his life. ("By the end he was so emaciated he looked like Jesus.")

The difference between them is that our narrator has something to live for -- her son ("my child, my savior, my treasure" -- whereas Jadviga is the titular "withered branch on a dead tree." Nothing more to the two-page story than this; just a moment in which grief is temporarily alleviated by the simple act of sharing it. Certainly not my cup of tea, but there's nothing offensive in Petrushevskaya's writing, and she lays out desperate times in an almost depressingly neat prose.

Short-a-Day: Keith Ridgway's "Goo Book"

2011-04-29T14:18:00.001-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, April 11, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 52.

Not the good book, mind you, that much is clear from the opening line -- "It was fucking hot" -- and the first section's introduction to our anti-hero, the sort of man who "slid through [tourists] like Jesus through children" and "came out the other side with a box purse and what his fingers had thought was a wallet but turned out to be a notebook," a character who dreams of the girl he has just slept with beside the canal as "probably snoring now, dreaming" or alternatively "being robbed, raped, murdered, bullied, torn apart, and if the canal had a tide she would drown, just for him, just because of him." He's the sort of person who worries that one can love too much, the good thief who goes out of his way to return the stolen notebook because he's filled with sentiments himself; he wants only emotionless money.

No, we're talking about the goo book here, a book that he has started to record his sentimental thoughts in -- and which she, his girlfriend, has started to do the same -- as "They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them." They are anti-Romeo and Juliet, a pair of damaged lovers who like to tie one another up and be hurt because of the way in which they hate themselves: "She hated her name. He hated his name." The book, then, is for tenderness and dreams; their physical lives, on the other hand, are partitioned from that, are meant to take on all the roughness of the world. Ironically, it's not clear that our protagonist knows much of the actual roughness out there: his father has gotten him a job working for some potentially violent characters, deal-makers that he serves as driver for, but he's never actually seen violence done -- he only suspects it. When police collar him and try to turn him, he not only agrees to their terms (easily coerced and fearful of prison), but winds up sleeping with one of the officers, a man named Hawthorn.

He doesn't know what he wants, or where he's going -- "I don't want to get ahead," he tells Hawthorn -- and is the perfectly passive driver: a man who takes action only at the behest of others. Ridgway's writing neatly fits the character, with much of the text being barked directives (short dialogue) or clipped sentences that summarize a life in transit. ("They talked about cars. They talked about money.") Mamet might enjoy working with characters such as these; for us, however, we gain only this singular idea of a subdivided man:

His mind was dividing. Parts of it were roped off. There were things he could say. There were things he could not say but could write in the book. And now there were things he could neither say nor write but only think, and they pressed up against the others like they wanted a fight.

At the story's end, the anti-hero and his lover are fleeing the country (for a more romantic Paris), scared off by paranoia. But while they successfully escape, it's not a happy ending, for he realizes that he's forgotten the book -- all of his goo, his tenderness, his good -- and even though the girl's brought it along, he still knows that, in a pinch, he was willing to forget and leave that part of him behind for good. And what does that say about the part of him that's left? It's a coarse, cautionary tale, then -- this "Goo Book."

PALE SPRING: When You Were Inside Them They Ceased To Be Clouds (§1 - §9)

2011-04-27T18:59:00.000-04:00

[The first in a series of posts that I'll be making for the blog-through of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, all of which can be found, in the future, at Pale Spring.]

If we are what we eat, then we are also what we read (or devour, in the case of David Foster Wallace), and so it is that §1, which only seems to be a simple (but rich) list of descriptions, dictates what we can expect of The Pale King, and what we can expect The Pale King to do to us. This opening is a shell-game of perspectives, far more than "coins of sunlight" sparkling on a "tobacco-brown river." It is, almost immediately, a series of contradictions, for while it is a "very old land" shaped with "quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs," it is also a place with a singular moment in which "an arrow of starlings [fire] from the windbreak's thatch," and a place newly anointed with "dew that stays where it is and steams all day." It is an "untilled" place, but it is processed enough to look like "flannel plains."

The ground from above is "blacktop graphs," the sky from below is "ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow" (and thereby the two never touch). From where you stand (note the second-person intrusion, the reader joining the author), things are defined and definite: "insects all business all the time." And yet, down the road from where you find "Your shoes' brand incised in the dew," we have the unshaped: "The horizon trembling, shapeless." In a moment, we will join Claude Sylvanshine en-route to Peoria via plane (§2); we shall then eavesdrop on two GS-9s in their "mindless monochrome drive up to Region HQ in Joliet" (§3); catch up on some IRS-related news (§4); flashback with Leonard Stecyk (§5), Lane A. Dean Jr. (§6), and Thomas Bondurant (§7); sit for a spell in a trailer park with Toni Ware and her mother "abroad again in endless night" (§8); and catch up with "the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona" (§9), and in this notably un-annular way, we will stress the kicker of that opening paragraph, which states that for all that we may see, experience, or be, "We are all of us brothers."

Anything can happen when we play with perspective in this fashion: the worms baked (and then unbaked) in the earth each day will constantly make new shapes in the ground; the "core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A - L to beyond." The word "illiterate," repeated with the frequency of a oscillating propeller, can cease to mean anything and yet still be lovely in itself. So as we travel, let us pay closer attention to the things we do share in common with one another -- the worms themselves, and not the shapes they temporarily make up -- and consider the twins of entertainment and boredom that we so often use in casual conversation to connect us. Let old stalwarts like "How 'bout them Yankees?" or "Lovely weather today, no?" give way to the underlying mindlessness they represent in our "safe" interactions; as Wallace puts it: "The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not" and "The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception's objects."

So what is it that we all have in common? What it is that Wallace wants to show us as he moves from the aerial overview to a slow decent ("mainly a heightening of the specificity of what lay below") toward a parking lot, "Each car not only parked by a different human individual but conceived, designed, assembled from parts each one of which was designed and made, transported, sold, financed, purchased, and insured by human standards, each with life stories and self-concepts that all fit together into a larger pattern of facts." If it is the anxiety that comes with being unable to recognize ourselves (or ourselves in others, thereby leading to distrust), then let us listen to these fears; let us see them and in seeing them, be unafraid.

The unnamed GS-9 makes me worried that others will not understand me. Frederick Blumquist makes me worried that no-one will notice that I am gone. Leonard Stecyk makes me worried that I will never be good enough, and worried that, in realizing this, I will never really try to be good enough. Lane A. Dean Jr. makes me worried that I am not a good person, simply because I worry that I may not be a good person. (He worries that "He might not even know his own heart or be able to read and know himself.") Additionally, worried that I, who have only rarely been in love, might have "no earthly idea what love is." Worried that, like Toni Ware, I have become so accustomed to life the way it is that I have limited myself from what might or should be. Worried, like Sylvanshine, that man is nothing more than "the exact pocket of space that he displaces," and terrified, like Wallace, that there is "some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us (whether or not we're consciously aware of it) spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least feeling with our full attention." But hopeful, too, in that we are all brothers, and that there is more than mere distraction. That as I stand here, in the dew-stricken pasture, affirming that everything is affixed, there lies change -- or the potential for change -- down the horizon, where none of us can entirely see.

THEATER: The Book of Mormon

2011-04-27T17:24:00.000-04:00

Lo, and it was true that Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Robert Lopez fill the book and lyrics of The Book of Mormon with references to fucking magical frogs (as opposed to virgin babies), fucking God in his various holes (including his cunt), and colorful characters like the crazed General Butt-Fucking Naked (which refers to the fashion in which he likes to slaughter people). Yea, but the true revelation -- racily given unto the audience -- was that the creators of South Park and Avenue Q had more than obvious jokes about overzealous Mormons and delusional Ugandans. Thus did the laugh-out-loud funny give way to the transcendental humor, in which the leaden salespitch of religion gave way to the golden tenor of the Broadway musical, and we were all saved from Yet Another Broadway Musical. Funnier than Spamalot, deeper than The Producers, The Book of Mormon is wedged between the winking sarcasm of Urinetown and the earnestness of The Drowsy Chaperone.

Long-term fans of Stone and Parker are no doubt unsurprised by this notice: their ability to hide deeper meaning in over-the-top premises and vulgarities has sustained South Park for fifteen years, taking it from the outright humor of an alien anal probe (or singing piece of fecal matter) to the absurd cracks at legalizing pot ("Medicinal Fried Chicken"), a damnable paparazzi ("Britney's New Look"), and bizarre economy ("Margaritaville"). But they will be cheered to know that tourists and theatergoers alike are getting the message beyond the buried gold plates and the maggots in my scrotum: "It was made up," realizes Elder Price (Andrew Rannells), reuniting with his prevaricating partner Elder Cunningham (Josh Gad), "but it pointed to something bigger." One hopes, too, that they walk out of the theater prepared to call an end to the American exceptionalism that The Book of Mormon mocks in its sanitized references to The Lion King and the song "I Am Africa," in which the missionaries naively purport to be not only in the same boat as their Ugandan neighbors -- but to be more authentic than they are. (The only downside to some of these agenda-driven songs is that they are less catchy than their anthemic brethren.)

As they did when "mocking" Scientology, The Book of Mormon simply presents the Mormon beliefs more or less as they are, trusting that the tale of ancient warring Hebrew tribes and Joseph Smith's communication with the angelic spirit Moroni (Rory O'Malley) will do their work for them. (It does.) This tricky bit of sincerity is the show's saving grace, particularly in the way the creators use it to subvert musical traditions, like the "love story." Here, Elder Cunningham and the village elder's daughter, Nabulungi (Nikki M. James), sing a terrifically euphemistic song that gets them both good and wet ("Baptize Me") . . . which turns out to be entirely literal. The same cannot be said for the Act II's climactic "Joseph Smith American Moses," in which Mafala Hatimbi (Michael Potts) leads his tribe in what they believe is an "accurate" musical portrayal of the religion they have now pledged themselves to, for though they sing of increasingly absurd things -- like hobbits and Ewoks and all the other embellishments Cunningham has passed down to them in good faith -- they, unlike the horrified visiting Mormons, understand the meaning and power of metaphor.

There's the real mark of faith, then: not so much the religion's past (its beliefs and lore) but its future (its actions). This is what we're taught by Price's breakdown in a "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" littered with leopard-printed devils who tap dance with silvery canes and top hats, to say nothing of a dancing quartet of Hitler, Jeffery Dahmer, Johnny Cochran, and Genghis Khan, or the twirling coffee cups and maple-glazed donuts. (The musical will forever be alive and chorus-line-kicking in dream sequences.) When he wakes up, it's to belt out "I Believe," which more or less dismisses the inanities of his religion in order to double-down on the faith that comes from believing in doing good nonetheless. And though this revelation doesn't have the result he's hoping for, it works wonders for The Book of Mormon, which is constantly pushing further than you thought it would -- even after explaining the English translation of the catchy, Hakuna Matata parody, "Hasa Diga Eebowai."

It takes a solid foundation in order to make those leaps of faith, and Parker, who co-directs with choreographer Casey Nicholaw, successfully provide that grounding. The framework of a Broadway musical is established from the very get-go -- a spotlight rising on the top of the proscenium, a curtain rising to reveal a chorus of polite doorbell ringers -- even as inexpensive scenic backdrops (Mormon headquarters is littered with fast-food chains) knock the needlessly lavish expense of other musicals. (At the same time, Ann Roth is tasked with designing a wide range of pop-culture costumes from Star Wars, each of which appears for roughly five seconds.) What appear at first to be shortcuts -- like a clap-on/clap-off lighting effect in the song "Turn It Off" -- reveal themselves to actually be stage illusions. (The second time the lights "clap on," the chorus's clothes have changed.)

In other words, The Book of Mormon is far more than it might seem -- not just in terms of being deeper than the blatant jokes, but in an homage to Broadway that runs far beyond simply name-checking other shows or dance techniques. Like all religious texts (and Broadway shows), it could stand a little editing, but let's not hold that against it, especially as it isn't holding anything back.

Short-a-Day: Ramona Ausubel's "Atria"

2011-04-27T13:48:00.000-04:00

Originally published in The New Yorker, April 4., 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 38.

What's the line -- if there is one -- between humans and beasts? High-school sophomore Hazel Whiting doesn't see much of one; life is a "soggy thing" to her, her peers look "like helpless, hairless baby rats," and she decides that she will "survive each of these endeavors by not becoming invested." And yet (a phrase that echoes through her mind), she winds up convinced that her mother -- who has already raised the daughter's three older sisters -- wants her to grow up faster, and so she sleeps with a beer-drinking and jerky-chewing clerk at the local 7-Eleven. Animals come into play again:

"Mmmmmm," he said. "Mmmmmm," she returned. Hazel thought they were like whales in the sea, searching for something over long dark distances.

Her final observation's a bit of a cliche -- "She had done this grownup thing, yet she suspected that her mother would find her even more childish for it" -- but the distance in her voice keeps the story fresh, a tone that's needed since she is raped by a stranger in the next section, and checking her urine two paragraphs later: "Hazel sat on a closed toilet next to a little plastic spear with a bright-blue plus sign on one end." But it's here that the tone starts to peter out: Hazel imagines the child within her as a menagerie of animals, from a "glowing fur baby" to a "large bird of prey," and various others. There's a little history given about her mother and sisters, who believe that their dead husband/father will return through the child, which might explain Hazel's disassociative fantasies, and yet . . . .

In the story's climax, she has given birth and is left alone with the baby. As it begins to cry in its bassinet, she goes to comfort it -- not as baby, though, but as what she recognizes it to be: a seal. She collects the blowing dew from the four-AM wind and sprinkles it on the child; when this is not enough, she begins to wring out a dirty mop atop the child; finally, she lifts up the entire bucket and soaks the baby through and through. The story ends there, with the two of them naked in the dark room, the "seal" suckling at her breast -- and it comes as a disappointment, an "Is that all?" moment. The language is fine -- "The bundle coughed one beautiful polished river rock of a cough" -- but with Johnny the 7-Eleven clerk popping in, the sisters and mother responsibly caring for her, the town shipping her endless sympathy casseroles, it's hard to resolve the story's ultimate destination and abandonment of its prior threads.

THEATER: "Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore."

2011-04-26T16:23:00.001-04:00

Photos/Steven Schreiber

Company XIV's latest, a so-called "meditation" on the desultory women in Charles Bukowski's life, is a carefully culled selection of the poet's work, each piece selected and subsequently edited into visually appealing chunks by Austin McCormick, the group's choreographer/director. Unlike previous work, however, which pulled a decidedly adult view (and physical) view of the stories of the Trojan War, Adam and Eve, and The Nutcracker, Love. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore. is a flightier work (as the four-part title suggests).

The end result is successfully stark and bleak: designer Zane Pihlstrom leaves the garage-like theater open, save for a cluttered "apartment" that we see through shutters and video feeds, and Gina Scherr's lighting is dusky, or fed up in dire earthy tones from the LED-boxed ground. That is, unfortunately, all that comes through: a dark, ravaging, and hard-to-follow screed in which Laura Careless dances atop a dirt-covered and rain-soaked piano lid (severed from its body), climbs the walls (so as to better scrawl curses on them), and writhes around in lingerie, all while a somber and wife-beater-wearing Jeff Takacs stalks the periphery, rasping Bukowski's words. Though McCormick comes up with a staggering number of ways to show these rough-and-tumble women, there's a one-note feel to them, to the point where the music, the words, and the dancing bleed together (retitled: "Lovusingbore").

That single note, however, is still a doozy -- or as Bukowski might put it, "All rump and breast and dizziness," and if the work seems stupid, it is "stupid with life," for whether you like it or not, Careless dances (and stomps, and spins, and rolls, and crosses, and grunts) the work to within an inch of that "stupid life." When the poet describes a drunken woman who trips in the street and slows traffic as a green antelope, it is McCormick who takes the image to task, using a fan to blow green smoke through the theater, and it is Careless who teeters in those "tower stilts" of her heels, to the point where she is often forced to walk on the sides of her shoes. She dances, at first, as a projection of the text (it lights her up, the words filling the floor and walls), and by the end of the play, she dances atop the writer, Takacs giving us a clear image of an author debased and lost in his own work, his haunting lyric women.

As a whole, Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore. seems incomplete, or at least less multifaceted than it was intended to be: despite being literal poetry in motion, the words seem entirely beside the point. But in specific moments and with special effects, Company XIV continues to prod the imagination. Though you may not fully understand their latest, you cannot help but feel it.

Short-a-Day: Lore Segal's "The Ice Worm"

2011-04-26T15:19:00.000-04:00

Originally published in Harper's, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 81.

A small story, no doubt, but far from a slight one. If Segal had written merely of Maggie's "small ice-worm of panic" upon finding that her elderly mother has been lost in the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the hospital's emergency admissions center, this would have been nothing new to the genre. Instead, however, Segal spends the first third of the story having the grandmother, Ilka, telling Maggie's son, David, a biblical story: she gets us invested in Ilka through the open love of the grandson, and sets a benchmark for Ilka's lucidity -- the way she carefully skirts around the violent confrontations between King David and Ishbi-benob of the Philistines -- that gives her growing senility more of a bite. This opening is such a heartwarming and simple expression of family that it's really only a matter of time before this storyline winds up on Parenthood, though Segal goes the extra mile to throw in a few observations about saintly Maggie's self-worth: "Good people don't think they are being good when they like doing the good thing. If they did it with gritted teeth, then they would think that it was good!"

The second third of the story covers Maggie's attempts to cope with the Kastel Street Social Service office (which indicates heavily how problematic eldercare is in this country, and how awful it may become if social services are cut); it notes, too, that for all our growing intimacy and affection for her mother, Ilka, we cannot justify giving her special treatment, for she is not the only suffering old person, nor is Maggie the only daughter struggling to provide for an aging relative (and Maggie has the calming help of her husband, Jeff, a man who, despite being "married to [his] own priorities," makes his wife's problems one of those priorities):

Maggie's idea was to place Ilka's face where Ms. Haze's eyes, as she seated herself in her chair, could not help meeting Ilka's eyes. And here Maggie's eyes met the eyes in the faces stapled, glued, and paper-clipped to all the notes and letters, and correctly attached in the upper-right corner of the applications waiting for Claudia Haze's perusal, determination, and appropriate action.

So it is, then, that the final third of the story does not simply set us on Maggie's ice-worm-driven side: we understand the terrible triages of the hospital, the impossible -- and thereby impersonal -- choices of the bureaucrats, and the awful truths that nostalgia forms because time has moved on -- things are no longer as they were, because they simply, bitterly are the way they are now. Well told, Segal, well told.

TV: Treme (Season Two)

2011-04-21T23:19:00.000-04:00

Having just gone back to watch the first season again, I maintain that there's nothing on television quite like Treme: it's the most character-driven (and at some points city-driven) show I've ever seen. Like The Wire, the second season is more of the same, only with a wider scope: let's look into the contractor racket, the reconstruction of schools, and the triage of the police department. You should definitely watch: read my whole review over at Slant.

THEATER: High

2011-04-20T01:17:00.000-04:00

The play's called High because it follows the attempts of a street-smart, plainclothes nun named Sister Jamison Connelly (Kathleen Turner) to reform a serious drug user, Cody Randall (Evan Jonigkeit), at the behest of her boss, Father Michael Delpapp (Stephen Kunken). The subject matter, however, is dead-on-arrival sober, which you'd expect from a playwright (Matthew Lombardo) who alludes to some expertise with addiction in his bio. It is also, unfortunately, slight, trite, empty, vacuous, boring, obvious, heavy-handed, lethargic, drowsy, and -- in case you aren't getting the picture -- repetitive. It is a show with precisely one idea, and perhaps one surprise, that nonetheless earnestly and awfully stretches itself to fill two acts, mainly by telegraphing what's going to happen ("Who knows," says Father Michael to Sister Jamison, "you might even learn something from this one") and summarizing what's just happened.

One expects better of Ms. Turner, but once you get over the shock of hearing her plangent voice wasted on such awful lines, there's a certain campy pleasure that stems from watching as she proudly holds her head high and, with a straight-face, speaks out: "Temptation. Whenever you give into it, it never ends well." At one point, Lombardo shamelessly retells that old self-destructive anecdote about the scorpion and the frog, and while it doesn't do much for the play, the sight of Ms. Turner serenely enunciating the punchline ("Glug. Glug. Glug.") nearly makes the whole thing worthwhile. Still, despite the unfunny jokes ("Why do you play the guilt card?" "I'm a Catholic priest!"), it's important to remember that High isn't a comedy; you'll especially want to keep this in mind while watching Jonigkeit's portrayal of being "high," particularly in his climactic Act I relapse, in which he spasms and howls and wobbles and leers and attempts to molest Sister Jamison, stark naked the whole time, mind you. This isn't to say that Jonigkeit doesn't have his moments, but most of the time, he's so snide and stereotypically over-the-top that it's hard to detect an ounce of character, let alone feeling. That the same can be said of Kunken, a veteran who comes across as a flighty amateur here, leads one to suspect that director Rob Ruggiero's to blame.

J'accuse, then! Ruggiero's production is a squalid, paint-by-numbers affair that cuts corners -- like character development -- all the way down to David Gallo's mirthless set design, which uses a spare, starlit backdrop for Sister Jamison's loopy monologues (the last of which "explains" the importance of said stars), and cranks out a few perfunctory white doors, chairs, and walls for the rehab center scenes. You'd think that space would be one of the key elements of a play about a druggie looking to escape, and the fact that Ruggiero so broadly lays out the stage shows how little he cares about containing and sustaining anything real, let alone dramatic. Here's a timely and appropriate metaphor for the effect: it'd be like rolling a blunt with a fishing net. Cody confesses that he was molested by one of his neglectful mother's Johns and Sister Jamison speaks of the problems with alcohol that made her turn to the convent: these are serious, weighty issues. But in the context of High, they slip right through the cracks, and the few emotions that do make it through, in a highly disconnected fashion, feel manipulative and unearned. (Much like the convenience of Cody being related to a terrible-at-his-job Father Michael.)

If High were a drug, it wouldn't even rate as skunk weed: it'd be baby powder, capable of satisfying only the good and truly deluded.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, The Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon"

2011-04-15T17:36:00.001-04:00

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 91.

My dutifully proud -- wear a mask and your face grows to fit it. Avoid all mirrors as though -- and no, worst, the black irony: now his wife and girls are bewitched this way now as well you see. As his mother -- the art he perfected upon her.

Written as a monologue (complete with humorously bleak medical stage directions) from FATHER to a "you" that starts out as a deathbed confession to a priest (a Father) and his divine sister, this story is filled with mid-sentence pauses and shifts like the ones above, and rich with a sense of this narrator's unreliable character, a fact that emphasizes the broader point Wallace is making (in his work) about perception and (I'll say it again) empathy. The key phrase here is "Wear a mask and your face grows to fit it," because for years, the father has been living a lie, refusing first to tell his wife that he detests their son, and then never admitting to his son -- with whom he awkwardly interacts -- that he's a detestably selfish hindrance to the father's own happiness. In this, the story shares unhappy secrets with "Adult World" and, more accurately, "Suicide as a Sort of Present," which, if you assume to be talking about the mother from this story, is really kicking things up a notch, for it says that both the father and mother detested the child, but both hid it -- the father, out of love for the mother, and the mother, out of her outward attempts to face her inner emotional difficulties. Even on its own, however, the story is a gripping piece, and yes, one that demands to be performed in a theater.

"If only I myself could have been taken in. My son. Oh and I did, prayed for it, pondered and sought, examined and studied him and prayed and sought without cease, praying to be taken in and bewitched and allow their scales to cover mine as well." Above all, I think loneliness is caused by one's inability to relate to the way other people view the world. Having an opinion which nobody agrees with can make you a pariah, and when it comes to an emotional or factually perceptive issue -- i.e., the color of the sky -- can go further, to the point where you are crazy, or worse, psychopathic. This is the danger of norms, that they attract more and more people to them -- whether those people agree with them or not (and look at how many people define themselves as Republican or Democrat, even when they disagree with whole swaths of policy) -- simply because nobody wants to be left out. And as this story shows, being untrue to yourself will consume you. Medically, it leads to the father being literally unable to breathe, swallowed up by his own decay.

The truth: I found it neither natural nor fulfilling nor beautiful nor fair. Think of me what you will. It is the truth. It was all disgusting. Ceaseless. The sensory assault. You cannot know. The incontinence. The vomit. The sheer smell. The noise. The theft of sleep. The selfishness, the appalling selfishness of the newborn, you have no idea. No one prepared us for any of it, for the sheer unpleasantness of it. The insane expense of pastel plastic things. The cloacal reek of the nursery. The endless laundry. The odors and constant noise. The disruption of any possible schedule. The slobber and terror and piercing shrieks. Like a needle those shrieks. Perhaps if someone had prepared, forewarned us. The endless reconfiguration of all schedules around him. Around his desires. He ruled from the crib, ruled from the first. Ruled her, reduced and remade her. Even as an infant the power he wielded.

Ignoring the ironies of the father's own current incontinence, vomit, and urine (all the plastic things attached to him), he's describing a baby as if it were an adult. He calls the baby out for its thoughtlessness at a time when, yes, it is more or less unformed in thoughts. And yet, he knows all of this: the father's tragedy is that what he also knows -- that this is natural and will become fulfilling -- is never realized. He cannot see things as they are -- or, worse -- perhaps he sees things as they really are, when you remove cultural expectations and societal indoctrination from the picture. (I'm sure there are many animals who are baffled and offended by the way we coddle our young.)

But perhaps the greatest tragedy of the piece is that the father is actually talking to his son, who he no longer recognizes. That he has, for nearly an hour, described to the son how he regrets not suffocating him as a child, how he finds the son greedy for weeping so heavily at the mother's funeral ("that he had the right to weep at her loss," seems to implicate the son in her death [suicide?]), how he finds it absurd how this sluggish learner is now celebrated with a Pulitzer, all for such shallow plays (like the one that we are reading, that is attacking him, and also ones that may deal with his mother's death, in which case the suicide would be like a present). Whether his observations/accusations are true/exaggerated or not -- it seems unlikely, given the lengths to which the son has gone to show up at the hospital every day, and the fact that he's married and celebrated and loved (which indicates jealousy, perhaps, from the father?) -- to at last break the silence before you die, simply to harm another? That's rough.

Given the painful content, this story's remarkably smooth to read, and it's filled with great payoffs about the disconnects and illusions under which we live our lives. No wonder "The Depressed Person" is so concerned about how others perceive her; Wallace's biggest fixation/point throughout Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (you might as well say "hideous people") is that we all constantly lie, and that our agreed upon lies are what lead to reality/"happiness."

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person"

2011-04-13T18:02:00.001-04:00

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 75.

Here's the most emblematic story of Wallace's c. 2000 fiction-writing style: a clinically written, circuitous, and emphatic third-person narrative about the self-torture that comes from losing an ability to empathize with and trust in the world around oneself. "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror," begins the story. We hear of the various medications she's been on, without effect, and learn of the horrifyingly petty Blame Games her divorced parents played over the costs of raising her, a childhood that has vestigially shaped the way she is now, with specific regard to her inability to blame anyone but herself. This is true to the extent that when she calls her Support Group -- her long-distance "friends" -- she spends as much time apologizing for her interruptions and pitiable behavior as she does attempting to talk about the formative traumas in her life, a vicious circle in which she feels demeaned by her attempts to feel less demeaned. (For example, she is mortified by the amount of money she spends to "force" her therapist to listen to her -- not because she doesn't have the money [and this reminds her of how her parents haggled over the principle of raising her] but because it re-enforces that she is the type of person who has to pay someone to be her best friend.)

So far as stories go, it's an excellent mood piece: we feel clutched at by the depressed person's intense needs, in the sense that we are almost dragged down with her, reaching the point at which we want -- like her friends -- to hang up the phone and stop listening. And yet we are also fascinated by the intricacies of her thought process, in which everything has a coded secret meaning; we are forced to wonder what it might be like to worry so much about how others see us, to be unable to forgive or forget or simply Be There (the code that she ignorantly uses to describe her Support Group's support). The unappealing nature of the story, which is really dryly written, in the flat tones of the depressed -- i.e., those who cannot feel/connect with themselves or others, but do, sadly, realize and fret over this (as opposed to psychopaths) -- shows that the story is having a successful effect on the reader. You sort of have to judge/see for yourself:

...resulted in the emergence of the depressed person's Inner Child and a cathartic tantrum in which the depressed person had struck repeatedly at a stack of velour cushions with a bat made of polystyrene foam and had shrieked obscenities and had reexperienced long-pent-up and festering emotional wounds, one of which being a deep vestigial rage over the fact that Walter D. ("Walt") DeLasandro Jr. had been able to bill her parents $130 an hour plus expenses for being put in the middle and playing the role of mediator and absorber of shit from both sides while she (i.e., the depressed person, as a child) had had to perform essentially the same coprophagous services on a more or less daily basis for free, for nothing, services which were not only grossly unfair and inappropriate for an emotionally sensitive child to be made to feel required to give form but about which her parents had then turned around and tried to make her, the depressed person herself, as a child, feel guilty about the staggering cost of Walter D. DeLasandro Jr. the Conference-Resolution Specialist's services, as if the repeated hassle and expense of Walter D. DeLasandro Jr. were her fault and only undertaken on her spoiled little snout-nosed snaggletoothed behalf instead of simply because of her fucking parents' utterly fucking sick inability to communicate and share honestly and work through their own sick, dysfunctional issues with each other.

Part of the reason this isn't necessarily The Most Fun To Read is because it seems so authentically what a character might actually be thinking, particularly in the close third-person narrative that the sentence slowly becomes (her voice/dialogue taking over with the italicization and curses). And, unlike other interior monologues, Wallace hasn't polished the voice to be clever or glib -- she doesn't make the sort of wry observations from which an audience can laugh alongside with (though Wallace is capable of doing so, and does, in fact, do so in other stories), but instead makes the sort of real and critical observations -- over and over again -- about her own self. This is what it feels like to be depressed, goes the story; this is what it feels like to be trapped, listening to her. (And for the record, you may remember Walter D. DeLasandro Jr. from "Yet Another Example of the Certain Porousness of Borders (VI)"; I've a strong suspicion that Wallace had lengthy and detailed back stories for all of his characters, no matter how minor, and that his use here is meant, in some way, to signify that we all have hurts, whether we get to talk about them or not.)

We've seen in Wallace's other stories, particularly from this collection, a running theme of characters struggling to express themselves, to explain something that they cannot find the words for. We've seen it in Wallace-as-a-character ("Octet") and Wallace-as-an-author ("Adult World (II)"), and we've seen it stylistically throughout in Wallace-as-a-writer (particularly in the dense, difficult to read "Church Not Made With Hands"). Knowing what we now know about Wallace-as-a-person, Pop Quiz #10: is it harder to read "The Depressed Person," recognizing that the man behind the curtain was suffering to describe a very real hurt himself? A story like this -- which asks you to suffer a little through the pace, but which still manages to be enlightening/interesting throughout -- gives me great confidence in The Pale King's ability to limn boredom.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko"

2011-04-12T02:40:00.002-04:00

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 86.

Creativity now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C-sharp siren Foretold, this would itself be acknowledged, this apotheosis of static flux, & be itself put to the cynical use of just what it acknowledged, like a funnel that falls through itself. "Soon, myths about myths" was the sirens' prophecy & long-range proposal. TV shows about TV shows. Polls about the reliability of surveys. Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC [before cable] mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation's terrible shamefaced hunger & need: translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing, inside the wooden belly of parodic camp.

So yeah, don't get hung up on whether or not you'll be able to follow the many in-jokes Wallace makes here about Agon M. Nar (Agamemnon) or the titular "Tri-Stan" and "I Sold" (Tristan and Isolde) or the blatant Nar(cissus) and Ecko (Echo) -- our humble author is quite upfront about his recombinant sources and parodic intentions, and so while the story isn't particularly deep -- beyond pointing out flaws in our relentless entertainment cycle that Wallace has made, better, elsewhere -- it is followable and, more importantly, funny, even in the weird non-poetic and well-endowed vocabulary of the semi-shorthand that the narrator, "the fuzzy Hensonian epiclete" Ovid the Obtuse, uses.

Wallace chooses to go way over the top in his mocking descriptions of these people, and does so at such a rapid clip that there's no need to bother looking up his unusual gerundizations of words (to say nothing of his neolonyms -- that's a portmanteau of neologism and eponym, all three literary devices of which are on display here). You just sort of go with the flow, as this "wise & clever programming executive" is punished -- for his daughter's extensive plastic surgery, which has made her supernaturally beautiful -- by Nature, and also by Codependae, the jealous wife of Stasis (think Hera and Zeus) -- who manipulate the waking dreams of a fallen rival of Agon's, turning him into a Romantic stalker of the passively viewed (and obsessed-over) Sissee. Watch how packed-full his paragraphs are:

...that if A.M.N.'d maybe let his Enhanced Love-Dumpling have one or two quick mithridatitic glimpses of herself in mirrors -- thus letting her glean even some slim bit of an idea what Herm ["Afro"] Deight MD's aesthetic Enhancements had wrought -- before at last Ecko of Venice's reflective shades hove into her unprepared view, she'd not have been so transfixed & shocked by an image which actually she alone in all the fluorescent basin saw in truth as imperfect nay flawed & inadequately Enhanced & like totally gnarlyly mortal, & she might have been able to keep it psychically together enough to run like hell & escape the semiautomatic Wagnerian intentions of the lunatic UHF-ghost-to-be.

Impressively, Wallace succeeds at creating something new out of something old; just as impressively, he makes a valid point about the shallowness and snarkiness and self-servingness of doing just so, without tainting the actual point he's making. (Expert satirists like Swift got away with such demonstrative jests all the time.) And honestly, if you don't laugh at his recasting of Nielsen as "God of Life Itself," then you're either a Luddite or dead inside. My personal favorite? The description of NBC's "roughly eighty, a thirtysomething knockoff about flappers & hepcats struggling to find both themselves & sustained continence in a modern nursing-care context." Setting aside that such programming more befits CBS, you'll have to admit that Wallace can tell and sell a highbrow/lowbrow joke rather well. This here's pure Entertainment, served with a side of creative recrimination.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Forever Overhead"

2011-04-11T23:14:00.062-04:00

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 95.

And so but here's the story that's almost the total opposite of "Church Not Made with Hands": it's poetically written, sure, but in a familiar and intimate second-person that thrusts us into what is an easily recognizable situation: a pubescent thirteen-year-old boy ("Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning"), on his birthday, decides to grow up by plunging off a local swimming pool's diving tower. Time slows for him in this formative moment and his senses flare to life: there is nothing too small to be detailed as he climbs out of the pool, stands in the line that snakes past the "SN CK BAR," and prepares to climb the ladder, feigning the boredom of waiting that comes to those who have done something before, who can no longer appreciate the experience with fresh eyes.

There are few fully descriptive pieces like this in Wallace's work, so the effect is dazzling: we see mountains that, spiked against the sky's fading red light, look like "an EKG of the dying day." We pause at hearing what is usually glossed over being meticulously written: "Knock your head with the heel of your hand. One side has a flabby echo. Cock your head to the side and hop -- sudden heat in your ear, delicious, and brain-warmed water turns cold on the nautilus of the ear's outside. You can hear harder tinnier music, closer shouts, much movement in much water." The pool is a "convulsive ballet of heads and arms." It is filled with "disproportionate boys, all necks and legs and knobby joints, shallow-chested, vaguely birdlike." When the pool is scarred a dive, it "reheals." The boy's sister plays Marco Polo, and "you" observe how it's almost cruel, the fact that she's been "It" for this long -- how quickly fun can flip on you; he makes a decision not to think about what he's about to do, noting that "being scared is caused mostly by thinking," a fact that we'll see illustrated in more than a few of Wallace's thought-to-death pieces (the depression this can lead to).

On the whole, this is an arresting view of childhood, and the story ends frozen on the cusp between his boyhood and manhood, with the realization that time does not stop and never will. (The level of imagery here reminds me, strongly, of David Mitchell's exceptional Black Swan Green, but the message is the same one executed so deftly by Steven Millhauser's recent must-read "Getting Closer.") My only sorrow is that this bright and hopeful story continues to hint at a hurt that will come with adulthood, as if the story threatens us with its beauty by pointing out how all this, too, shall pass -- savagely, painfully -- until we reach a point where we are standing blindly, impatiently in line, as bored as everyone else with the world itself. Creativity and empathy were the qualities Wallace preached (without the religions over/undertones) in his commencement speech; he reminded us to keep our eyes open and to appreciate the moments around us. A story like "Forever Overhead" inspires us to do just that.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Church Not Made with Hands"

2011-04-10T14:53:00.002-04:00

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 0.

First, an epigrammatic quote from A. O. Scott's New York Review of Books article on the oeuvre of Wallace (c. 1999): "Wallace, then, is less anti-ironic than (forgive me) meta-ironic. That is, his gambit is to turn irony back on itself, to make his fiction relentlessly conscious of its own self-consciousness, and thus to produce work that will be at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to earth." I lead with that, because to me, that's the essence of Wallace's best writing (both fiction and non-fiction): work that is relentlessly conscious, work in which we can see the writer struggling to name the world around him, to understand it, a God-like task that is made simpler for the reader, who is led to realize that We Are All in the Same Boat.

Which brings me to "Church Not Made with Hands," the first piece of Wallace's I've read that appears to be struggle-free. In the worst way possible. Confusing from the get-go -- "Drawn lids one screen of skin, dreampaintings move across Day's colored dark" -- the work gets more pretentious from there, hinting only briefly at Day's profession as a part-time art-therapist and his own mental issue, the brain damage done to his wife's daughter, Esther, whom was caught in the suction part of their private pool, and whom he (a non-swimmer), was unable to save. Elements of this permeate the story, it's true, from the use of color -- particularly pink and clear blue -- to the waterlogged writing itself, through which one struggle to find purchase. But rather than make you ponder the situation, these distant, distant third-person characters, the work is ponderous, filled with apparently meaningless descriptions and short sentences that fly by: "Sunlight reverses HEALTH pink through the windshield's sticker. Day drives the county car past a factory."

Further complicating things are the jumps in time, helplessly marked by vague section headers like "Art" or "Two Colors," and which give us exchanges like this:

"Colors," he says to the screen's black lattice.
The screen breathes mint.
"She complaints I turn colors in my sleep," Day says.
"Something understands," breathes the screen, "surely."
Knees sore, Day jangles pockets with his hands. So many coins.

The overt poetry of this piece, distinct from Wallace's regular output, is a cruel and stifling thing, for we want to understand the significance of Day's encounters with a "truly old former Jesuit" who now gives lectures on famous Dutch painters. Instead, we get descriptions of the way the light hits the college's bell-tower: "In which open spaces flash like diseased nerves and bent trees hang with a viscous aura that settles to set the grass on willemite fire, in which windrows of light pile up against fence-bottoms, walls, and undulate and glow." Ostensibly, a church made with hands is the "steeple" position that a man, such as Day's boss Dr. Ndiawar, makes by pressing his fingertips together; the story, then, aims to tell about a totally internalized prayer, but appears hung-up on the external. It is, at best, an argument for how outside of ourselves we are, numbed, after tragedy, when it is then that we must double-down our attentive interior to coping with the world. But that's stretching rather far, and the story's not the vehicle taking us there; it's just another obstacle.

THEATER: The Tremendous Tremendous

2011-04-10T05:15:00.001-04:00

Coming toward the end of the Great Depression, the 1939 World's Fair was designed to be a tremendous exhibition, one that would celebrate and unite the many different peoples of the world. To this effect, one of the highlights was the Westinghouse Time Capsule (though most of us will have to take Wikipedia's word for that), which captured that singular moment in time. While it's true that the capsule isn't due to be unearthed until the year 6939, that hasn't stopped the Mad Ones from painstakingly recreating one such moment -- the eighty celebratory, real-time minutes following the final performance of the Tremendous Traveling Abbots. What follows -- The Tremendous Tremendous -- doesn't wear itself out or sell itself short. Like their previous work, Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War, the company uses a timeless setting to focus on the minutiae that keep us living and thriving together.

The play opens with a reversal of the usual theatrical norms: the five-member cast is returning from their final performance, a Shakespearean tragedy (done as a comedic vaudeville act), and between triumphant shots of liquor, they go to the sad task of taking off their fake breasts, unstrapping their blood packets, and washing the greasepaint from their faces. What was the Abbotts' finest hour -- the New York Times gave them an energetic five stars -- may have passed, and the future is terrifying. (They're divided over what their next gig should be.) This, in turn, is a second reversal on our expectations: rather than move on, the group attempts to live in the glorious past, the result of which is a gripping and emotional yet largely plot-less play. (Nothing wrong with that, especially if you're a fan of character-focused playwrights like Annie Baker, and particularly impressive, considering that the play was written by the ensemble.)

Of course, nothing is that simple: the future isn't simply the bright and shiny thing the World's Fair promises it will be, nor is the past this grand Golden Age to swoon over. Squid (Michael Dalto), the group's swarthy musician, has only recently joined the group, and the company does their best to avoid mentioning Murray, the fallen legend he replaced. For all their smiles, his death is a matter of contention between the tomboy Lucilla (Stephanie Wright Thompson) and the wry Bald Henry (Marc Bovino), to say nothing of the deeper sorrow this summons up in the serious Charlie (Joe Curnutte), an emotion that their bubbling leader, Tall Henry (Henry Vick, new to the company, though you'd never be able to tell), does his best to soothe. But such specifics are hardly the point; the subtext exists merely to convince us of the deep bonds and history that ties the group (which isn't really related) together: watch the way they rib one another about their barroom flirting, unite to make up stories on the fly (a preposterous explanation of how Charlie lost his leg), and sweetly share gifts with one another. They're so loose, so utterly convincing, that you'll feel like a time-traveling party-crashing voyeur (particularly in the intimate space).

In fact, everything about The Tremendous Tremendous feels authentic, from the type of popcorn they throw into one another's mouths to Sydney Gallas's brilliant costuming; from the silent projection of the World's Fair they marvel over together to the lights studding their dressing-room mirror. Though the Mad Ones bring this aesthetic with them (they're credited as producers and set designers), they're aided by Jeffrey Withers, who, being primarily an actor, is the right sort of director for a piece this loose and character-driven. That is, though the plot drifts -- it's not unusual for two distinct conversations to take place at once -- there isn't a single moment that feels unnecessary, and that applies to the ending, which takes a turn that, while unexpected to we on the outside, seems inevitable to the Abbotts.

So forget the sealed capsule, forget the lifeless exhibits: The Tremendous Tremendous is the thing worth remembering, a testament not only to a time and a people, but to the idea that we can be better than this, and for as long as we choose to make that moment last.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Adult World (I) & (II)"

2011-04-09T23:46:00.001-04:00

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 76.

You may have noticed by now that many of Wallace's stories don't exactly end. After watching the author struggle within the fiction of "Octet," the logic behind this becomes clearer: to end a story is to, in some way, resolve it; in turn, this can be said to then absolve the reader of any obligation to come to terms with it, much in the same way that when an answer key is provided to a student's mathematics homework (when it is presolved), the student has less motivation to derive a logical/fitting answer. For this reason, Wallace splits "Adult World" into two stories. (I) is a three-part exploration of an "immature, inexperienced, emotionally labile young wife" who, after three-and-a-half-years of worrying that she's hurting his "thingie" when they have sex, has an epiphany that accounts for all the subtext in her dream images and for her husband's peculiar quirks. (II), on the other hand, is the fourth part of the same story, written as a schema (a formal outline often done in shorthand, as Wallace was wont to do), the part that actually explains the nature of the epiphany and details what happens next -- a sort of "ending" that Wallace was apparently unable to force himself to seriously write (as in, as an actual story segment, and not just as the writerly, self-conscious outline of such), and throughout which there are bracketed notes reminding the author to "avoid ez gag."

The first "Adult World" is familiar stuff, written in the "mxmly fat/affectless/distant/dry" voice that Wallace trusts not to betray any smugness or cliche on the part of the narrator, but will instead clinically detail the issues at this hand, cutting to the heart of the mature/immature theme here, i.e., what does it take to be "one flesh," for two people to really lose themselves without concerning themselves about what comes next? The second "Adult World," however, is jokey (read the descriptions of the dildos), builds toward a punchline ("4b. Concl {embed}: '...were ready thus to begin, in a calm and mutually respectful way, to discuss having children {together}.'"), and actually works, thematically, to illustrate the post-epiphany relationship, in which the man with secrets (he's a compulsive masturbator, pretending to get off with his wife because he loves her) is now truly bound to the woman who has none (she's overcome her insecurities, and has laid everything out -- including the vibrators -- before her).

Most impressive about "Adult World" is the way in which Wallace is able to sustain our interest in the young wife's rather facile concern, slowly building an elaborate and crippling condition out of her inability to simply confront the husband. (Note how this parallels the husband, who, in refusing to tell his wife about his masturbatory needs, winds up with a near-crippled condition of his own.) We could laugh about their situation -- and there are some winningly witty observations -- but we could also take it seriously, for it's nothing more than the X-rated version, perhaps, of insecurities and fears that most of us will, at some point, hold bottled up. (You can tie this into the whole sexual undertone of the piece, too; i.e., the idea of reaching release together -- finding a happier, more comfortable union by not holding back.) I'm not entirely sure what to make of the husband's inability to come clean (pun intended), nor of the overwritten scene with the wife's Former Lover, who she interrogates in order to figure out if the sex problem is all in her head, but suffice to say, the story is working rather hard (pun intended) and on many levels, and I admire it for that, even if I'm not totally sold on the second part of it.

THEATER: Bring Us the Head of Your Daughter

2011-04-08T17:09:00.002-04:00

Photo/Larry Cobra

"Forgiveness is the easiest way to ignore shit that ain't pleasant!" shouts Dexel (Jordan Tisdale) as he attempts to reinsert himself (after a long estrangement) into the life of his half-sister, Contessa (Mara Lileas). So it's more than a little surprising that Bring Us the Head of Your Daughter -- an early play by Derek Ahonen (revised for this production) -- is filled with so much forgiveness and unpleasantness. As the volume ratchets up, the characters grow more melodramatic, and the situations flaunt plausibility, it becomes all too easy to ignore their motivations and underlying truths, and to fixate on the shock of it all: two lesbians, Contessa and Jackie (Anna Stromberg), have raised a spoiled daughter, Garance (Sarah Roy), who spends her time dressing in blackface and cannibalizing housewives at random. Dexel raped Contessa when they were both fifteen; Jackie is a fall-down drunk who has been enabled by her repressed wife. What needs to be a tragic dissection of American values is instead a comic distortion of them, a play that is so many sheets to the wind that it's barely intelligible.

In Ahonen's previous shows for the Amoralists, conventions have always been subverted for some deeper reason -- the uniting religion of Amerissiah; the passions of Happy in the Poorhouse; the utopianism of their best work, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side -- but with Daughter, which purports to be about the necessity of family, the sight of a cannibal giving a rapist a massage is just that, and nothing more. To be more accurate, when the theatrical Garance finally makes her appearance and is given the opportunity to explain her actions, she simply screams at the top of her lungs -- as she did as a child at piano recital -- and sticks out her tongue. It's a cry for attention for the sake of attention, and has as much to do with the lack of a father figure in her life as her insistence on speaking with an English accent has to do with her "hatred" of America. Under all that, Ahonen is struggling with America's paradoxical split between puritanical and excessive values, but by so easily resolving the absurd dramas of the play -- Oh, let's just move to Israel; Say, let's find that daughter I left at the adoption agency -- we don't rubberneck long enough to feel involved or implicated.

Ahonen's direction shows an awareness of the play's breakneck speed, and frequently slows down, but this inadvertently has the opposite effect as intended, for it exaggerates the comic portions -- see Garance, sneaking around like a ninja in her burqua -- while telegraphing and diminishing the serious portions. Significance isn't created by placing a hideously lengthy pause between two characters: it is earned. This extends to the cast, as well, which needs to find reasons for their actions beyond their being directed to do so. Ms. Lileas approaches Contessa -- rightly so -- with a strong backbone and resilience, but is time and time again forced to abandon that strength for the sake of physical comedy, so much so that she ends up a cipher. As for Ms. Stromberg and Ms. Roy, who are asked to play "drunk" and "crazy": they come across as well-acted but motivation-less moods, not characters. Only the repentant Mr. Tisdale, whose AIDS-afflicted Dexel realistically struggles with reasons to stay and put up with all this shit, comes across as a character in full, which is all the more a shame given how rich Alfred Schatz's kitchen/living-room set and noisy Brian Lazuras's sound design is.

The Amoralists have the components to put on good, original theater, and have boldly widened their company in this, their fifth straight year of productions, but at this point, they seem to be running on fumes. Bring Us the Head of Your Daughter still has the manic energy of their past work, but it lacks the head-rolling conviction that made me fall for them in the first place.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Octet"

2011-04-08T15:49:00.003-04:00

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 92.

As a fiction writer myself (specifically an unpublished fiction writer), I am RIGHT THERE with Wallace's self-professed "honest" struggles to salvage the metabelletristic fiasco of these eight pop-quiz interrogations (only three of which he's actually included, a fourth of which is a revision of one of the earlier pieces) by introducing a "ninth" pop quiz that begins as such: "You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as 'short stories'..." Through the duration of this lengthy and heavily annotated "final" quiz, Wallace stresses the importance of honesty, that being the key that will save the story from being simply a "cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext." He also points out the thin thin line on which the story skates, that it must be

...both grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious at the same time, [lest] any real human urgency in the Quiz's scenario and palpations is obscured by what appears to be just more of the cynical, amusing-ourselves-to-death-type commercial comedy that's already sucked so much felt urgency out of contemporary life in the first place...

Yes, this point's been made in Infinite Jest, but given how raptly readers have been poring over interviews with Wallace's editors and colleagues circa that 1994 publication, they might just as well hear it from the self-conscious author himself, some five years later. The internal struggle of the author is on full display here, and although it does sometimes tip too far into manipulation or "ironic undercutting" -- particularly in the footnotes warning us about the use of terms like "relationship," "to be," and "feelings" -- these flaws are what we're being asked to empathize with in the first place, re: the whole interrogatory quiz structure, and the more he (= Wallace) contorts to himself understand what he cannot find a way to write, the more he, in his unclear clarity, succeeds in convincing us that there is in fact something to be salvaged from his failure.

You could see something near religious/messianic in this, if you wished, the whole Author nakedly suffering for us situation, something coyly hinted at with this line: "you will have to puncture the fourth wall [among other things you'll have to puncture]." Here it is again, the author speaking of his own desperation:

It's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do . . . more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.

And isn't this, in the end, why so many of us love him? Because he was right there with us, more obviously so as our stand-in in his essays, but also struggling within the boundaries of his own signifying fiction? Because it was his wavering conviction, his lack of perfection that made his ideas seem all the more rational and approachable? Yes, as a result of his struggles, we had to wrestle with his text, too, particularly in the pop-quiz portions (4, 6, 7, and 6a) that preceded this one (9), but this is the whole point. Or as Y puts it to X, who has just confided his feelings of "self-loathing and -urtication":

But X, by finally resorting to having Y conduct a thought-experiment in which Y pretends to be X and ruminates aloud on what he (meaning Y, as X) might do if faced with this malignant and horripilative pons asinorum, gets Y finally to aver that the best he (i.e., Y as X, and thus by extension X himself) can probably do in the situation is simply to passively hang in there, i.e., just Show Up, continue to Be There...

In other words, only by having us pretend that we are these characters (such as the "two late-stage terminal drug addicts" who show one another a real human kindness in the freezing alley, or the formally poor mother who gives up primary custody upon her divorce in order to insure that her child has a made-for-life trust fund), can Wallace begin to convince us of the internal sameness that he's convinced we all share. This sameness, incidentally, is the self-obsession/-consciousness we have w/r/t being liked and loved by those around us, a fact that if we openly faced instead of building defenses around, might actually allow us some true happiness and connection in this world. And so it's here, in "Octet," that Wallace pulls together all the loose threads of the short shorts in this collection (many of which I'd argued were not, in fact, short stories), and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.

Those who believe Wallace to be nothing more than a stunt-writer, a postmodernist, aren't reading deeply enough into a story like this; they're greedily lapping up the flaws and contradictions as a way of excusing themselves from the real honesty that a participatory story like this requires; they're stepping back from the trying, failing, and trying again that I, as a writer myself, feel reinvigorated by. Let's get lost together.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace \ (More) Short Shorts (Exclusively) from "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"

2011-04-07T14:46:00.001-04:00

If you're writing a very short story, it may be because you don't have much to say, but that doesn't mean you can't at least say it creatively, as Wallace does in one of his odder classics, "Datum Centurio." The "story" is written as an entry from Leckie & Webster's Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage © 2096, one that's looking specifically at the third definition of the noun form of "date." He offers us two forms, one for a "soft date" (in which one "voluntarily submit[s] one's nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neurogenetic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface") and one for a "hard date," which involves "the creation and/or use of a Virtual Female Sensory Array," and is derived from "hardware date."

In tracing the history and usage of this future term, Wallace explains that as our culture grows more emotionally distant (or "hard"), we will require the antonymic "soft" term in order to connote tender sentiments. There's some clever stuff in here, too, about the divide between the predominantly male-centric view of the purposes of a 20th C "date" and the supposedly female one: "(B) the unilateral pursuit of an immediate vigorous, and uncodified episode of genital interface without regard to neurogenetic compatibility or soft offspring or even a telephone call the next day." This is where Wallace's technical prose comes in handy, for it forces us to really look and consider our actual terms and uses (and purposes) for the language we use today, when we throw "fuck" around without anything behind it, and perhaps already cheapen the idea of dating. This is, like much of Wallace's fiction at this phase, cautionary, and in this case, the warning is loud and clear. [72/100]

Where Wallace's least successful stories run into problems, then, is in writing a story in which the whole point revolves around the intellectual thought of not having much to say, or, in this case, "Signifying Nothing." Here, a first-person narrator recalls what led to the estrangement from and reparation with his parents: as he was moving out at the age of 19, he recalled a moment where, as a young child, his father "waggled his dick" in front of him for several minutes. It's not an innocent memory, but it's not an especially harmful one, either: the narrator isn't scarred by it, and knows that nothing ever came of it, but, confused by it, confronts his father. The father, however, acknowledges this with a look of embarrassment -- not for himself, but for his son, the sort of look you might give "you were at a large, fancy, and coat-and-tie dinner or track banquet with your father, and if, like, you all of a sudden got up on the banquet table and bent down and took a shit right there on the table, in front of everybody at the dinner--this would be the look your father would be giving you as you did it (took a shit)." This enrages the son, who cuts off all ties for nearly a year until at last considering that, this being a random occurrence (the dick-waggling) that's been suppressed for so long, perhaps the father doesn't remember it, which would somewhat explain his unbelieving reaction.

In essence, the story is asking us what really matters -- i.e., is of significance. Which, if in fact any, of our memories shape us and actually hold meaning? But we get into tricky waters here, for in order for this story (or any story) to be worth reading, then we must assume that everything does matter, does hold influence and significance, and is something we can learn from. Is Wallace trying to convince us of this through the route of reverse-psychology? I'm left unaffected, especially after recalling Wallace's non-fictional Signifying Rappers, which obsesses over finding meaning in what might otherwise be throwaway lyrics. [19/100]

And the hardest for last: "Suicide as a Sort of Present." It's hard to read anything from Wallace that directly references suicide these days, particularly a story that's filled with clinical descriptions of self-loathing. (I don't imagine that rereading "The Depressed Person" is going to be much of a picnic.) In any case, the story here refers to a dangerous spiral that begins with "a mother who had a very hard time indeed, emotionally, inside," a mother who despite never being physically abused, "had some very heavy psychic shit laid on her as a little girl," the result of which made her view "everything in life with apprehension, as if every occasion and opportunity were some sort of dreadfully important exam for which she had been too lazy or stupid to prepare properly." In this vicious cycle of depression, she recognizes that this pressure is entirely internal, which makes her loathe herself even more; this, in turn, makes herself push herself even harder to succeed, which makes her friends see her as incredibly "bright, attractive, popular, impressive," which, in turn, only makes the pressure even more of an internal thing.

This becomes an even harsher sentence when she actually becomes a mother, for she holds her child up to those same impossible expectations, and cannot help but see the child's poor behavior as a reflection/extension of herself. And yet, she's caught in a trap, because "no good mother can loathe her child or abuse it or wish it harm in any way," and so no matter what the son does, she can only love him more. This, of course, doesn't have overly positive effects on the uncontrolled son, who, because of the mother's unconditional love, sees her as the only positive thing in "a world of psychic shit." Which leads to the final line, and the callback to the title itself: "She could not, of course, express any of this [loathing]. And so the son -- desperate, as are all children, to repay the perfect love we may expect only of mothers -- expressed it all for her." This one's cautionary, too, in the sense of "impossible expectations" and all, but it's tragic, too, knowing what we know of Wallace, in that awareness alone isn't a solution. [34/100]

THEATER: Blue Man Group

2011-04-06T17:35:00.001-04:00

When a show runs as long as Blue Man Group (twenty years!), it's easy to take it for granted, a part of the neighborhood you, having once been there, hardly think about any more. I speak from my own experience here, since the last time I saw their show I was only thirteen years old; although I was impressed (as I was by Stomp, Blast, and other musical spectacles), I didn't give the show any further thought. I speak also from observing the audience, which seemed to be composed largely of rowdy tourists (a large group shared the "splatter zone" seats). The point is: though they seem to be having no trouble filling the theater, perhaps its time for regular theatergoers and New Yorkers to think about Blue Man Group again. After all, their shtick involves playfully looking at ordinary things anew, and we can all stand a spot of wonderment in our lives.

The first thing you've probably forgotten about Blue Man Group is that they're not just a bunch of blue-clad drummers. Yes, they like to thwack paint-filled puddles with drumsticks, and they like to experiment with the various sound-waves you can get from shortening and elongating giant tubes. But they're also a cadre of clowns, wide-eyed merry-making mimes who may pull you onstage to share a Twinkies dinner (aliens love candy, don't they?) or who may teach your children to turn eating cereal (Cap'n Crunch) into a musical adventure.

The second thing you've probably forgotten about Blue Man Group is that while they don't talk, they've got video interludes and on-screen text that's filled with some self-aware jokes and existential science. In other words, you won't just be dazzled by their colors; you'll have a neatly digestible lesson regarding the rods and cones in our retinas. You won't just be asked to shake your booty in the climactic having-a-good-time "rave" scene; you'll hear what seem like hundreds of slang terms for your behind, your trunk, your caboose, your "happy walrus with no tusks."

The third thing you've probably forgotten about Blue Man Group is that their show, which tours around the world and has permanent locations in a quite a few cities, keeps evolving its material. A xylophone-like synthesizer now allows for shout-outs not just to, say, Beethoven, but to Lady Gaga. More importantly, a variety of new segments have been added to the show that revolve around three "GiPad" devices -- iPads that are nearly twice as tall as the performers -- that descend from the ceiling and allow for some digital delights. In fact, the highlight of the show involves an illusion brought about by the "Digi-Enhance" feature of the GiPads: what begins as a series of onscreen images mirroring the live performers turns into a series of comic quick-changes, in which a Blue Man runs "into" one side of the digital image and out the other . . . only to find himself now wearing the avatar's costume. It's the most intricately timed portion of the evening, rivaled only by the physically impressive feat with which one Blue Man catches over sixteen marshmallows in his mouth -- at one time. (Kids will be rolling in the aisles; you may want to remind them not to try that at home.)

There are still a few ponderously pandering moments -- the Blue Men perhaps spend too much time wandering the theater's aisles, and a "human paintbrush" segment is charmlessly performed backstage -- but the show succeeds in leaving the audience with a sense of community and euphoria, which is the whole point. The Blue Man Group aren't just a bunch of musicians and mimes; they're ambassadors from a far-out planet, here to make friends and new discoveries, and their show remains a terrific staycation for the whole family.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace \ Short Shorts (Exclusively) from "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"

2011-04-06T05:56:00.003-04:00

And now, the best micro-story that you'll ever read:

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never know, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

This is the page-zero opener of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, entitled "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life." Consider this the follow-up to Girl with Curious Hair's "My Appearance," in which although sincerity has long been shown the door, we soldier on with grim humor. These two potential lovers don't talk about themselves: if they did, they might not be liked, even if it can only be the appearance of being liked (considering that, not actually knowing anything about one another, there is nothing to like). And there's something funny and sad in saying "She laughed extremely hard," for laughter should be free, not forced. As they leave, alone, focused entirely on their own narrow strips of pavement, we can imagine their faces twisted up into a smile and down into a frown. And, of course, the kicker: even the man who introduced them doesn't like them; will we ever be able to take anything at face-value again? [100/100]

This is a recurring theme for Wallace, and it leads to the identically titled stories, "The Devil Is a Busy Man." The first sums up suspicion by relating an anecdote about a man who finds it difficult to give things away until he decides to try selling, instead, for "bargain" prices. ("And they'd be skittery about it too and their face all closed up like at cards and they'd walk around the thing and poke at it with their toe and go Where'd you all get it at what's the matter with it how come you want shed of it so bad.") Though Craigslist has made it easier to find less-picky scavengers, it still looks like we feel better ripping someone off than getting charity (that's why they call it a "steal"): yeah, we're pretty evil.

This point is cemented in the second story, in which a man has done a good deed for someone else, and now struggles to avoid telling them -- or us -- about it, as a selfless act requires anonymity. By the end of the story, he realizes that while not being specific, he has been implicitly seeking gratitude -- whether it's unconscious (as he claims) or not, he comes to this conclusion:

I showed an unconscious and, seemingly, natural, automatic ability to both deceive myself and other people, which, on the "motivational level," not only completely emptied the generous thing I tried to do of any true value, and caused me to fail again, in my attempts to sincerely be what someone would classify as truly a "nice" or "good" person, but, despairingly, cast me in a light to myself which could only be classified as "dark," "evil," or "beyond hope of ever sincerely becoming good."

These still aren't "stories" as much as they are "readable philosophy lessons," but to that end, they're crisper and more effective than the "Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders" series, particularly in the way Wallace so perfectly vocalizes a moralizer's thought-process, working toward an inescapable truth about man even as he tries to fly away from it. It is sad enough that it is so hard to trust another person; but to live with the idea that it may be impossible to trust even our own actions as being anything more than selfish? (No wonder knowledge, that damned apple, is said to be a curse.) [69/100]

I don't mind the lack of character in these stories, or rather, the way in which "character" has been internalized so that the readers can see what happens when they test these thoughts in their own brains. But if you then can't get into the narrator's head, it's not just the logic that breaks: the story falls apart as well. That's what happens with "Think," which seems to be daring the reader to figure out what the man is thinking as the woman -- his wife's former roommate's younger sister -- frees her breasts and, striking poses from Victoria's Secret catalogs and replaying seduction scenes from films, approaches him. "It's not what you think I'm afraid of," he finally says, having fallen to his knees to pray, so we know that it's not because of the images of his wife and child flashing through his head. We'll never know, because Wallace wants us to imagine what it would be like to stand in this man's shoes; he purposefully omits details and information in the hopes that we will flex our mental muscles and think, perhaps to empathize, perhaps to not. But as he's shown in his other work, without such an obvious gimmick, there are ways for him to tell a story and make us think, so there's little positive I can really say about this exercise, no matter how vivid certain parts may be. [16/100]

THEATER: Marie and Bruce

2011-04-05T23:51:00.206-04:00

Photo/Monique Carboni

Though they share the same bed, there's a deep disconnect between Marie (Marisa Tomei) and Bruce (Frank Whaley). If that's not apparent from the first moment you see them in Marie and Bruce, playwright Wallace Shawn quickly clears up any confusion with Marie's opening monologue, a long harangue in which she repeatedly calls him a "shit" and a "cocksucker." That Bruce ignores her mocking shows either how depressingly inured he is to life with her -- and she to him, to have built up such an arsenal of insults -- or, more realistically, given the introspective style of much of Shawn's work, shows how much of this relationship is built on silence, i.e., the festering things not said aloud. That both are possible is actually a credit to Scott Elliot's vocally explicit, emotionally implicit direction, which magnifies the play's psychic rift by leaving the audience unsure of what to believe. (For instance, Marie insists that Bruce's trousers reek of urine, and he ends up changing pants, but because there are no visible stains, we have to take her word for it.)

This uncertainty is especially effective given that the play (save for a few monologues) is hyperrealistic, much like the film My Dinner with Andre, which Wallace completed two years after writing Marie and Bruce in 1979. In fact, the majority of the play takes place at the dinner party of a friend, Frank (Adam Trese): philosophical conversations and small talk take center stage (around designer Derek McLane's slowly spinning round table) as what we know about Marie -- she plans to leave Bruce after this party -- and what we are finding out about Bruce -- he's a likable guy with some ugly vices -- provide ominous, almost suspenseful subtext. With smooth segues from Shawn and gentle lighting shifts from Elliott (who has always been a genius with crowd scenes), an entire evening of highs and lows fly by, and as the diners grow fatigued, so do the cracks and separations between them, particularly with Marie, who quietly falls asleep at the table, alone in a sea of people.

Toward the end of the dinner, one of the guests bursts out with the philosophical conceit of Marie and Bruce, stressing that we don't always feel what we're actually feeling -- that is, because we're stuck processing things in our head, confused by, say, societal values that insist we should feel a certain way, we become separated from our true selves. Both Marie and Bruce are dependent on one another to some degree; have they mistaken that, somehow, for love? Thankfully, Shawn doesn't have any other guests blurt out the answer; instead, he doubles-down on subtleties that a wearied Tomei seems to dredge out of her soul in her post-dinner confrontation with Whaley, who, in turn, shows an anger and helplessness that sheds some light on an earlier revelation of his involving waitresses with low self-esteem and hotel-room voyeurism. These are just flawed people, after all; they, like us, don't have the answers. However, in watching them muddle through their relationship, we, unlike them, can have a good time.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace \ Short Shorts (Mostly) from "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men"

2011-04-05T23:37:00.000-04:00

At the tail-end of Girl with Curious Hair (ironically, just before his longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way"), Wallace makes a sudden shift toward shorter fiction -- pure anecdotes or vignettes that briefly distill an idea, leaving the wrestling mainly up to the reader. And that's fine, but only when it's really intensely done: there's not enough room in these shorts for Wallace to wander or play at vagueness.

That's precisely the problem with Curious Hair's "Everything Is Green," which opens in media res after our first-person narrator, Mitch, has apparently accused his younger girlfriend, Mayfly, of cheating on him. She's denied it, but "It is for sure that she is lying. When it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her." In their rundown trailer, Mitch confesses that "Every thing that is inside me I have gave you" and that he feels "like there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more." All this is fine, and familiar in tone to his previous stories "Here and There" and "Say Never," but then Wallace takes a poetic turn, has Mayfly spout this: "Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when everything outside is green like it is." The idea, perhaps, is that even in the face of betrayal, we should recognize that life itself goes on, unaffected, and we should find comfort in that, not sorrow, this realizing of how small we are in the world, how minute our problems are . . . even though Mitch observes, wisely, that there are plenty of things that aren't green. There's something to be said for perspective -- having it, that is -- but the point is unconvincingly made here. [6/100]

Ten years later -- though with the many, many anticonfluential short shorts of Infinite Jest under his belt -- Wallace fills his second collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, with many more stories of this length, albeit written in a more restrained and meditative (recursive, hypnotic, mantra-like) style. In fact, he returns to the color green, too, in the "opening" story (well, there's one on page zero, but we'll get to that), "Death Is Not the End." In a three-page sentence, we are introduced to a fifty-six-year-old American poet, his physical descriptions and current place in time constantly undercut by a series of his titles and awards (going so far as to interject footnotes), and the story itself can be seen as a struggle between that which he is and that which he will be remembered by. (Or as the subject versus the object.) To wit:

...he sat, or lay -- or perhaps most accurately just 'reclined' -- in a black Speedo swimsuit by the home's kidney-shaped pool,[1] on the pool's tile deck, in a portable deck chair whose back was now reclined four clicks to an angle of 35° w/r/t the deck's mosaic tile, at 10:20 A.M on 15 May 1995, the fourth most anthologized poet of the history of American belles lettres, near an umbrella but not in the actual shade of the umbrella...
[1]Also the first American-born poet ever in the Nobel Prize for Literature's distinguished 94-year history to receive it, the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature.

At last, the sentence ends and we break to a few shorter, concluding sentences, which speak of the "intensely green" surrounding shrubbery, and the "very nearly wholly silent" setting, which is "not like anything else in the world in either appearance or suggestion," though this last and final point is itself footnoted with the somewhat ambiguous and unsettling "That is not wholly true." So man's place in nature is to be still? And what does this have to do with death, save to assume that our lives are merely interruptions in the world, not to be stressed over? [12/100]

These stories are precise in form, but they lack content -- the old stick shaken at "postmodernism" -- and are hard to assess as "stories" in a qualitative sense. Things get even trickier, however, with a triptych (and pair) of stories in the collection that share the same title, but nothing else in common. Take, for instance, "Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders." The first iteration, (XI), speaks to the border between our dreams and our realities, fixing briefly on a man who is so overwrought by a vivid dream in which he is blind that, upon waking, he is blinded by his tears, and while he is still able to go to work -- he isn't actually blind -- he is so emotionally drained by this idea that he falls asleep again:

Then all day at work then I'm incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people's faces and to know exactly where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost....

Fair enough, but then we're suddenly reading the reconstructed transcript of Mr. Walter D. ("Walt") DeLasandro Jr.'s Parents' Marriage's End, May 1956" (VI), in which a husband and wife divvy up their property: "Look I get the doublewide you get the truck we flip for the boy." Is the thin border here the wall, perhaps, through which we assume Walt has heard this conversation and recounted it to his therapist some many years down the road? Or is it the way things stick with us throughout time, so that we are unable to separate our past from our future and move on? The whole coin toss is a jarring moment of comedy/tragedy, but beyond that, the story is a bagatelle.

To say nothing of the final installment (XXIV), in which a boy, having his hair cut by his mother, is tormented by his brother's mocking mimicry of his own faces, realizing, perhaps, the porous boundary here of identity -- that is, if someone resembles me so totally, then what am I? And also the nightmarish sense of looking -- really looking -- at oneself in the mirror and not recognizing what you see: who am I? An interesting thought, perhaps, but better explored by the students of Enfield Tennis Academy, who dealt with faces in the floor and sweat-licking gurus for this sort of thing. Moreover, Wallace overwrites this section, to the point at which it's almost Joycean in difficult to tell what he's saying (perhaps intentional, given the somewhat Irish lilt):

...my face before us both farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held brats must see in the fun-house mirror--the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges---as the mimcry ascended reflected levels to become finally the burlesque of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a wet white brow, the strangled man's sobs blocked by cloth, storm's thrum and electric hiss and Da's mutter against the lalation of shears meant for lambs....

Hard to grade these indeed, especially in any sense as a "complete" story or an interconnected set, but when it comes down to whether or not these brief encounters will keep me up at night or make me want to revisit them, I guess I'd score them as a 31, 8, and a 3. After all, the real porousness should be between the freedom of the page and the bordered sections of the mind. [14/100]

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Say Never"

2011-04-04T15:08:00.001-04:00

Originally published in Girl with Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 48.

I mentioned yesterday that Wallace's characters were sometimes criticized for appearing to be shallow constructs with which the author can demonstrate a point -- for instance, in this story, that humans are abruptly changeable things (hence the title, playfully modeled after the axiomatic never say never). I added, too, that when Wallace is dealing with the shallowness of Media and its insistence on appearances, this isn't really much of an issue: the characters are magnified by their proximity to that great magnifying glass of a television set. (Likewise when Wallace is writing specifically of General Characters, like the Account Representative, for then they are pared down to the titles which we ourselves may then more directly assume, and don't we all have a secret wish when reading to assume those roles, at least vicariously?) But for stories like "Say Never," which end abruptly, before the climax, and which flit between a variety of narrative styles as a shorthand for character (a bit like Faulkner, though not as developed), I can understand the complaint, even if I soldier through it out of love and respect for the artist at work.

Lenny is a happily married academic, "known" for his pre-Hitler book on Germany (Motion in Poetry: The Theme of Momentum in Weimar Republic Verse), who, compared to his thuggish younger brother, Michael, is the saint of the family, the one who calls his mother, Mrs. Tagus, like clockwork, just to let her know that she's loved and not alone. Wallace opens his story with the stereotypically Jewish voice of Mr. Labov, a tailor and friend of the family, who is comforting Mrs. Tagus: "A thing that is no fun? Stomach trouble." He then jumps to the dialogue-only of Mikey and Louis, in which Mikey complains about being dumped by the spicy Carlita ("I can see maybe whey they cry, when you blow them off"), before briefly cutting to a love-struck Len: "Cinnamon girl, spiced cream, honey to kiss, melt hot around the center of me." These characters, however, are being used purely for contrast in the tale -- and a little for exposition in Labov's case -- in order to set forth the hypothesis that Len, a nice guy, has suddenly changed, and that there is no reason for it. But after receiving Len's own scholarly word for it, we hardly need the other characters:

L. S. Tagus, having for nine years navigated successfully between the Scylla and Charybdis of Inclination and Opportunity, has, as of today, 21 February 1985, committed adultery, on four occasions, with one Carlina Renaria-Cruz, former significant other of my brother, Michael Arnold Tagus; that the party anticipates further episodes of such adultery; and that such past and highly probable future episodes will be brought to the attention of the party's wife, Mrs. Bonnie Flutterman Tagus, between 1:00 and 2:00 pm (lunch), this date.
Know further that it is neither the desire & intention of L. Tagus, nor the project of an openly probing letter, either: (a) to excuse those libidinal/genital activities on the part of this party likely to excite disfavor or -ease within his intimate constellation; or: (b) to explain same, since the explanation of any transgression inevitably metastasizes into excuse (see (a)); but rather merely: (c) to inform those parties on whom my existence and the behavior that defines same can be expected to have an effect of the events outlined above and discussed, as usual, below; and: (d) to describe, probably via the time-tested heuristic pentad, the W's of why those events have taken and do and will take place; and: (e) to project the foreseeable consequences of such activities for this correspondent, for those other parties (B.F.T., M.A.T.) directly affected by his choices, and for those other parties who psychic fortunes are, to whatever extent, bound up with our own.

It's by playing around with narrative, in fact, that Wallace defuses what would otherwise be a fairly solid look at the fickleness of character, which results in the sorts of character-undefining moments that Wallace has Len go on to describe, such as the night he and his wife awake at the same time, see each other without recognition, and then go back to sleep, together but apart. Or with the naked dishonesty with which he dismisses the chestnuts of It's Not You It's Me, and "[We're] Just Not Right For Each Other Any More Mom, that We've Grown Apart, with Nothing But the Kids To Hold Us Together, and Is That Fair To Of All People The Kids?" Each time he moves the frame from Len, he offers excuses, nevers; but it's when he remains on a repentantly unrepentant Len that he best makes his point, that he lets us in. (Remember, above all else, Empathy, which causes me to think of Edward Albee's The Goat.)

Above all, time spent away from Lenny is time that we're deprived of internal mechanics such as these:

I could respond honestly with the kind of interior paralysis that also attends any sustained intersection of two people's everyday stuffed-together practical concerns, and how this restricts the breath of a man... Vs. this partner, who is in best and worst ways still a child: either sulking, overcome, silent, screaming Yes (Si! Yes! {God!}).... Yes Mrs. Tagus weary of navigation, exigency, routineschmerz, mid-life angst rendered. A unit of cinnamon milk, on fire with love for no one ever, vs. exhaustively tested loyalty, hard-headed realism, compassion, momentum, a woman the color and odor of Noxzema for all time.
Vs. vs. vs. : the reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.
Because I just tired of being well. Of being good. Maybe I'm just tired of not knowing where in me the millenial expectations of a constellation leave off, where my own will hangs its beaver hat. I wish a little well-hung corner. I wish to be willful. I will it. It is not one bit more complicated than no more mr. n. g.

The more we read of Lenny, the less it comes across as the so-called "mid-life crisis" and the more it comes across as an honestly surprised self-evaluation, in which one is caught off guard by new desires to the point where one wonders why we try to repress desires in the first place. Out of loyalty? To whom? (Not to make excuses for infidelity, but rather to attempt to understand it and the whole mess of human connectivity.) And that, which hinges on the absent "never" of the title, is where Wallace has something to say; not in the cliches of the angry, drug-fueled younger brother nor in the motherly concerns of the mother. I love the overflow of ideas that stem from a largely unedited (or successfully defending) Wallace, but from a critical standpoint, particularly of this early work, I wonder what tightening these think-pieces might have done. (The irony of this critique -- being written on an unedited blog that could certainly use more tightening and less stream-of-rantingness, but which would itself lose something of its pure thoughts in the process -- is not lost on me.)