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

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

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: How My Mother Died of Cancer And Other Bedtime Stories

[Part of the Fringe Encores Series]

How My Mother Died of Cancer and Other Bedtime Stories is all over the place, and that's OK: it can't be easy to write a personal piece about the death of your mother. But there's a limit to how far you can get by on sympathy, and does Chris Kelly really want his play to succeed based on pity? The schema he's following is that of Lisa Kron's Well, in that as Kelly's stand-in Kate (Elizabeth Romanski) attempts to grieve by recreating those last few months onstage, only to be constantly interrupted by her father (Mike Boland), who hates the theatricality of it. And that's the awful problem at the heart of How My Mother Died: there's a lack of sincerity. Kate is not Chris, and there's a troubling layer of "theater" in that the people playing Kate's circle--brother Tim (Jim deProphetis), comic gay friend Trent (Josh Hemphill), stoner-ish Barry (Dylan Kammerer), and ditsy Lena (Brianna Tyson)--are supposed to be her actual friends and family, whereas her mother (Sharon Wyse) is, obviously, being played by an actor. But as directed by Laura Moss, everybody comes across, first and foremost, as an actor, and that makes it hard to forgive the often intentionally amateurish production. (Kate reminds us that the budget is tight.)

It's not easy to get past this convention, since Kelly spends so much of the show stressing it--a defense mechanism, perhaps, gone amok. But on the other side, there is quite a deal of whimsical coping: the mother plays "Wheel of Cancer" and, after being hooked-up to a breathing machine for her lung cancer, is forced to play charades to communicate. Trent, who loves being the center of attention, nicely hams up scenes (and accents) where he likens doctors to mechanics, turns a eulogy into a Mad Lib, and spoofs late-night exercise infomercials: "Tumors of Steel." Tim makes a great straight man for all these antics, allowing Kate to turn away from lip-sync versions of "She's a Lady" or Music Man-like choreography, and to actually relate memories--like those bedtime stories that give her such reason to miss her mother.

The best moment in How My Mother Died of Cancer comes as the father attempts to recreate his last moments with his wife, only to get frustrated by trying to remember the lines his daughter has written for him. At that point, the actor playing the mother speaks directly to him, telling him not to worry about the script, to just speak, and to speak from the heart. It's good advice: would that more of Kelly's show felt brave enough to do exactly that, to stand by its conventions (or its discarding of them, ala Young Jean Lee's Lear) and to speak through them, instead of merely at them.

FRINGE: Garage

[Reviewed for Time Out New York's Fringe Binge]

FRINGE: The Princes of Persuasion

The Princes of Persuasion: Recipes for Romance makes for an oddly entertaining concert, not a satisfying work of theater. Ithai Benjamin's music is catchy, Rebeca Raney's lyrics are delightfully twisted (think Roald Dahl), and the automated puppets are novel and neatly designed. But the show is mostly prerecorded, and the puppets, not Benjamin, are the characters: airy and deranged Linda, sensible Destiny, boyish but occasionally demonic Lil' Bo-tique, and the goofy Domingo (whose eyes and nose face a different direction from his mouth). Wouldn't this work just as well or better as an installation at a kooky tourist trap like Jekyll and Hyde Cafe (the new "Muppets Family") or as a series of high-grade YouTube clips (ala Henson Studios)? This is even truer considering that The Princes of Persuasion has no plot, no momentum: it's just a loose series of conversations that serve only to segue into songs like "Long Legs," which features this goofy verse: "Mustache, mustache/ I never grew one/ tiny hairs above my lip/ it would tickle your face/ with our noses tip to tip." But though it can't compete with the far more complete Jollyship the Whiz-Bang and Avenue Q, it's whimsically winning enough to persuade Fringe audiences to love it. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "The audience revolts against false royalty" and 5 being "All hail the king," The Princes of Persuasion gets a 4.

FRINGE: Faster than the Speed of White

Captain Northstar (Pushkar Sharma) and Ensign Southstar (Sathya Sridharan) are aboard the Brownstar Galactica, seeking out the Alcove of Answers, where they hope to at last answer this burning question: "Why did Shaq make Shaq-Fu?" [Insert the sound of a record screeching to a halt.] That's not really what Faster than the Speed of White is about, and yet that line is in there, holding Brownstar back from their quest to find a place for the South Asian American actor. Their only role model, seen in flashbacks, is Kal Penn Mohdi, who is either a "trailblazer" or "subcontinental degradation." These two spoken-word artists--and their bassist Chuck Aka The 3rd Dimension (Charles Kim)--are also stuck between two poles, either "imaginative" or "derivative." Sridharan, a loose physical comedian (he'd be great on Saturday Night Live), works better with the esoterically nerdy stuff than Sharma, who is stuck being the straight man (though he's funny as Van Wilder's Taj Mahal Badlandabad), but at least both are boldly going where few have gone before. If director Nick Choksi can cut down on all the dead space, and the two can tighten their search for identity around a more specific medium (e.g., Star Trek as opposed to all sci-fi), they'll have a much more arresting show. (Consider The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, which used wrestling to make a broader point about ethnic identity.) They need a sleeker ship for killer lines like these : "Space Indians might not need accents, you ever think about that?" On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "This should have gone down with Alderaan" and 5 being "More astonishing than the X-Men," Faster than the Speed of White gets a 3.5.

FRINGE: The Secretaries

At one point in the Five Lesbian Brothers' 1993 play, The Secretaries, the depressed former-secretary-of-the-month Ashley (Karen Stanion) starts chugging printer toner, the frustratingly-still-overweight Peaches (Elizabeth A. Bell) gives in to her cravings and devours some solid food, and the normally relaxed and openly gay Dawn (Virginia Baeta) starts smashing at her frozen computer--it's that time of the month. Or so you think: rather, this comic exaggeration is about women who refuse to fit in--especially to the prim secretarial roles they've been assigned to at the Cooney Lumber Company in Big Bone, Oregon: "And once a month we kill a man and chop him up." But don't be fooled by the camp: "We don't kill them because they're bad," announces their boss, Susan (Jamie Heinlein), to their new recruit, innocent Patty (Elizabeth Whitney). "We kill them because we're bad." The show is actually an attack on anything remotely ordinary or normalizing, from Slim-Fast shakes to expense accounts to Feminism itself. Mark Finley's direction isn't primal enough for this sort of rebel yell, especially since the dated comedy is no longer shocking in of itself, but the show is still fairly funny, and the cast--if it's not offensive to say so--is darling. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Find a new vocation," and 5 being "There's a new executive in town," The Secretaries gets a 3.5.

FRINGE: The Great Galvani

The Great Galvani promises "the highest of high-quality acts," so it opens with the Bearded Lady (Kevlyn Hayes) and her ruminations on appearance, then shifts to Galvani (H. B. Ward), who proceeds to conjure up some high-quality feces (out of his ass, naturally). It's a giant misdirect, as is the way he summons P. T. Barnum into his own body for a monologue, and if the show were longer than a half-hour, the clever philosophical "edutainment" that writer/director Shawn Reddy sneaks in under that hammy cover might really pack a punch. (This show is only part of a quartet on "the intricacies of self-torture.") Even still, it calls to mind the rich minimalism of Will Eno's Thom Pain, what with the wry romanticism, the unavoidable habit to "love what will not last." Galvani's father issues and memories of biological experiments on frogs mix neatly together, and they're as much about nothing as they are about everything. More simply put: "Everything is monumental," he says, having just set up a little parable about the banning of pitchfork rebellions today leading to the wiretapping of tomorrow. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Hocus schmocus" and 5 being "Mind-boggling good," The Great Galvani gets a 3.5.

FRINGE: Alternative Methods

Dear Patricia Davis: Please take your lecture off its high horse. Rather than investigate the role American psychologists have played in the torture of "suspected terrorists," consider the role American playwrights have played in making ticking-time-bomb scenarios, like the one you employ in Alternative Methods, so tedious. We don't need black-and-white characters like the rule-breaking private contractor Mike Flemming (Charlie Kevin) and his yes-man doctor, Robert Wolf (John Greenleaf), showing us what not to do. We need characters with some real intelligence and depth--Alok Tewari's performance as the accused Dr. Al-Badrani is so flat and stereotypical that it makes one want to waterboard him. There's a spark of a back-story given to rookie psychologist Susan Fulton (Julie Kline), enough to explain why she bonds with Al-Badrani and tries to subvert military conduct to free him, but that sort of illogical idealism belongs in Hollywood, which is fake enough to handle such things. On the other hand, Josh Liveright's direction is nice--particularly his transitions, and the way they employ Alex Koch's video design, which never lets us forget the time. Paul Smithyman and Elyse Handelman also deliver: their rotating interrogation room of a set allows us to watch through both sides of a "one-way" mirror, and though the reaction shots are generally hammy, they at least hint at something more. That's the real disappointment: that Alternative Methods only provides more of the same. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Jack Bauer yelling" and 5 being "Jack Bauer yelling, but in a way that is somehow more convincing," Alternative Methods gets a 1.5.

FRINGE: Art of Attack

Of the many chess metaphors that overstuff Asa Merritt's Art of Attack, the big one comes down to whether or not the eight-by-eight board contains an infinite amount of space--as estranged brothers Kaz (Patrick Barrett) and Sergei (Jared Houseman) believe--or if it's just a small board, too small to throw one's life away on, which is the stance of Kaz's girlfriend Rose (Cordelia Istel). For the somewhat tedious first hour, it's both: there's an almost inexhaustible number of clever gambits, but they're all used for the exact same goal. Kaz, who was blinded in an accident, needs his brother to help him train for a tournament; Sergei, who realized he was as addicted to the game as their dead grandmaster of a father, hasn't touched a board in years--it's a stalemate. At last, however, the two set their arguments aside and actually play chess, adding color commentary and letting out all the nuances they (and director Joshua Kahan Brody) have been bottling up. It makes all the difference in the world: if the first half of the play is reading up on intellectual strategy, the second half is all about putting things into practice. It almost holds up, too--but Merritt overcommits to a second climax. The final scenes are not just confusing, with sexual tension added between Rose and Sergei and Rose going somewhat insane, but undercut the previous ones: it's the equivalent of continuing to play after losing one's king. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Stalemate" and 5 being "Checkmate," Art of Attack gets a 3.5.

FRINGE: Evan O'Television in Double Negatives

If you've watched Louie on FX, then you've seen the pinnacle of the comedy-as-therapy genre, in which laughter--especially at metacomedic tricks--serves as a sort of exorcism of whatever ails you. In the opening act of Evan O'Television in Double Negatives, "Seamus" makes it clear that that's what he and his brother (both are played by Evan O'Sullivan) are about, and his following monologue comes across as a free-associative rant against his literally incomprehensible mother. ("9/11 Truth orgy? Please tell me you mean .org.") The main act makes this even clearer: Evan spends the next fifty minutes talking to a pre-recorded version of himself. (He calls this "conceptual comedy," joking that if they called it performance art, nobody would come.) When they're in sync--or deliberately out of it, as with one gag--the performance is delightful: it's self-self-deprecating humor. (Consider one skit in which the televised Evan plays a therapist who is attempting to treat the live Evan's psychotic habit of "talking to himself.") Entertaining as this "renowned one-man duo" is at first (O'Sullivan's mirthful similarity to Modern Family's Eric Stonestreet doesn't hurt), the gimmick exhausts itself after a half-hour. It doesn't help that "both" actors are the straight man and that the live Evan often has to mumble extra text to stay on cue--the show needs some fine tuning (pardon the pun). Still, it's an original thought, a brave performance, and a moderately funny show--it's certainly worth checking out. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Canned laughter" and 5 being "Syndication, here we come," Double Negatives gets a 3.

FRINGE: The Conveniences of Modern Living

Love is a matter of "spontaneiality," according to one of the charming characters in The Conveniences of Modern Living; when Daniel John Kelley and Emily Plumb are at their best, they manage to conjure up a lovely mix of spontaneous reality. Best not to dwell on the talking Dryer (Jessica Love)--it's enough that an innocent face simply peers out of that door with fabric softener sheets crinkled through her hair and a long slinky-pipe of an arm. And such imagery fits perfectly with the precocious poetry of ten-year-old Bobson (Zack Palomo), who is falling for his babysitter, Agnes (Maya Baldwin)--and not just in their make-believe games. It also saves Agnes's husband, Harold (Rory Sheridan), from having to explain exactly what he's doing on those late nights with the Dryer. The less it's acknowledged, the easier it is to accept that--following the loss of their child--this is just how things are. But as the play continues, it becomes self-aware of its absurdity, veering into a farcical and campy dinner scene with Bobson's horrible parents--the selfish and sniping Bettina (Tavia Trepte) and the drugged-out and arrogant Bernard (David Ian Lee)--and runs out of things to say. Instead, it spins a bunch of hot air around and around, attempting to steal gravity from Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" and losing the unique charm of its own childishly romantic fantasy: "I would sit forever in the principal's office of your heart." On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Totally on the fritz" and 5 being "A real life-saver," The Conveniences of Modern Living gets a 3.

FRINGE: A Matter of Choice

[Reviewed for Time Out New York's Fringe Binge]

FRINGE: Cats Don't Grin

[Reviewed for Time Out New York's Fringe Binge]

FRINGE: Two Sizes Too Small

Jessica Kane has a great idea for a short story, but she can't write dialogue. So why oh why has she directed Two Sizes Too Small as a radio play? It's ironic that things start with Paul (John Wernke) trying to squeeze his feet into all of the shoes in his house--for Kane shoehorns in many unneeded effects, from Scott Paulson's barely-there Foley effects to Joe McGinty's character themes (for piano), which overscore an already overwritten script. The meat of the story remains the undiagnosable shrinkage of everything around Paul, and how others react to this--and there is something both creepy and charming about the way in which "normal" takes on a new meaning as his mother (Lorraine Serabian) and girlfriend (Minna Taylor, who tries her best) go about painting new clothes onto his body. It's harder to understand the inclusion of a rather flat-footed Eric Purcell as a quack doctor--save that Kane wants the mother to have a wacky love interest. It's also unclear why Paul's irrelevant co-worker Larry (Scott Janes) didn't wind up on the cutting floor. The fumbling performances--unforgivable, considering they've got scripts in front of them--aren't the biggest problem, though, nor is the smallness of their characters. Instead, it's the pedantic dialogue, which relies on the pejorative "Jesus!" to save them from all of their problems. Characters resort to summarizing their action--there's already a narrator for that (Michael Douglass)--and go about explaining their feelings, which makes the play drag, instead of sprinting with the urgency it pretends to have. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Watch out for tetanus," and 5 being "Usain Bolt can't touch this," Two Sizes Too Small gets a 1.5.

FRINGE: Trick Boxing

Trick Boxing is exactly what you'd expect of a show that's been touring for the last eight years: a tight, original, charming two-hander. Brian Sostek and Megan McClellan's writing isn't quite up to the standard of Ben Hecht (The Front Page), but the rapid-fire patter is; if nothing else, Sostek should find steady work as a voice-actor. Only the dance sequences feel as if they're holding something back, though perhaps that's just because Sostek needs to breathe before pivoting back into his multiple levels of narration. One minute, he's breaking the basics of boxing down to us as Bill Buck, a trainer; the next, he's the hunchbacked ex-fighter Tommy, who is wheezing fight-fixing threats down Bill's back; moments later, here's the just-off-the-boat apple-seller who Bill's pinned his hopes on, the newly christened Dancin' Danny David, who swing-dances his way around every punch in the book. As our hero steps into the ring, Sostek becomes the announcer, using hand-puppets to show us Dancin' David's improbable matches (each more hysterical than the last); stepping out of the ring, he's being trained in the art of romance by Bella, a good ol' dame. There's a lot packed into the show--and the show consequently packs a punch; it's a winningly screwball, perfectly pugilistic performance. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "A below-the-belt disqualification" and 5 being "A new world champion," Trick Boxing gets a 4.5.

FRINGE: My Name Is Ruth

The Book of Ruth is a dramatically inert part of the Old Testament, and though Stephen W. Baldwin's My Name Is Ruth drags it into the '50s, he hasn't found a way to expand or enrich the material. In fact, he's minimized it, paring the story down to two actors, Ruth (Magdalyn Donnelly) and the various men in her life (Jeffrey D. Querin), a convention filled with aimless monologues to invisible people. He's also wasted the talents of his design team--Barb Scott's only able to show off two of her cute costumes, and Pamela Querin has but one set with which to sell the department-store glamor (she does). Given the plodding pace, Baldwin's would-be quaint dialogue quickly sours. Ruth is a folksy woman, and Donnelly's a delight in that capacity--she all but redeems the phrase "You bet'cha" and sells lines like "Jeepers, if it were a man, I'd marry it"--but that's all she is. There isn't an ounce of depth; this play cries out for a stronger woman (think Mad Men's Peggy). This is doubly true given the milquetoast performance from Querin, who equates nervousness with a squeaky voice and thinks he can be a villain simply by sneering. The inevitable showdown between Querin's "good" and "bad" guy roles--Boaz and KR--isn't just anticlimactic, it's tedious. There's either enough material in the show to fill forty minutes, or room to flesh out the story so it's not stuck on a one-note romance (that currently lacks chemistry): either way, this concept needs a lot more work. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "A time best forgotten" and 5 being "The golden age of theater," My Name Is Ruth gets a 2.5.

FRINGE: Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill!

In adapting Seijun Suzuki's surreal 1967 B-movie "yakuza noir" Branded to Kill, Patrick Harrison--who also directs and stars--has run with fundamental principle of Suzuki's: "There is no film grammar." This freedom from rules makes for a liberating show--and one becomes so immersed in the madcap presentation that it takes a while to realize that his company, Depth Charge, actually has a lot of structure behind their work. (It's almost disappointing to learn that this group has ties to Richard Foreman and John Zorn's Astronome.) Adam Scott Mazer's fight scenes are deliriously entertaining, and he makes the most of the way these ranked assassins run around shooting each other with cocked fingers, yelling the word "bang." Dave Harrington's live music--whether it's a schizoid remix of sampled sounds, a battering of cymbals, or the seductive plucking of a giant cello--adds to the immediacy of the atmosphere. And there's always something new: a pas de deux between a puppet bullet and butterfly as they arc in lazy circles; a slapstick sequence in which characters flee a floating cross-hair. The show is disturbingly erotic, too: Hanada (Harrison) has a boiled-rice fetish, and we see his wife, Mami (Alexandra Hellquist), tease him into violence with it; later, it will spill in slow motion out of the lips of his new lover, Misako (Margaret Odette Perkins). Don't dismiss this as pure imagery: when Mami mounts Hanada, wearing a butterfly mask and silhouetted in red light, the emotions are raw and very real. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Dis-u-grace-u-ful" and 5 being "The #1 killer," Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill! gets a 4.5.

FRINGE: Bagabones

Bagacrap. Sorry, that's unduly harsh--Jonathan Nosan's Bagabones is mainly suffering from false advertising. If you omit the charming part, then yes, the first twenty minutes are indeed a "contortionist's charming nightmare," but the next twenty are given over to a static, pseudoscientific lecture--in Japanese, with blurry translations in English, Sanskrit, and French scrolling beneath him. Perhaps you're into that; just know that while he's being metaphoric in his references to "primal spaces," he's being literal when he says there's an "ultimately smashing end" to his show (he breaks a piece of pottery). It's embarrassing--for him--how seriously he takes this "artistic expression": he arrogantly takes his curtain call in slow motion. Despite the artful opening, in which Nosan paces the walls and ceilings of his rotating-cube set, there are no Inception-like layers to back up that empty effect; instead, it turns to cheap magic tricks (three-ball juggling). Cirque du Soleil this is not. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Just break my bones" and 5 being "Bending it better than Beckham," Bagabones gets a 0.

FRINGE: Love in the Time of Swine Flu

A title like Love in the Time of Swine Flu promises a series of themed, tightened skits. Instead, while the show has some recurring moments (an unfortunate series of parlor games a fiancee plays with his soon-to-be-parents-in-law), the ensemble Stupid Time Machine keeps it way too loose: it's obvious they've just thrown everything at the wall. On the plus side, one-note stuff (like new airport security measures that inevitably resemble grinding at a rave) remains mercifully brief; on the negative side, just as the show gets rolling (a vampire has performance anxiety and has to teethsturbate as his victim talks dirty about her veins), it cuts to something else. Jokes about making a Berenstain Bears porn (this may have beat them to the punch) repeat themselves too often to be funny. Even well-acted skits--like one in which Obama tries to explain clean energy to his hapless Senate--run into the ground, from highs (the Texan wants to know how much oil it'll take to run a windmill) to lows (the deficit is a six-eyed monster lurking beneath the sea). The highlight of the show comes from a series of mash-up movie trailers which include things like The Hangover-meets-1776, a romantic comedy set at the start of World War I (starring Matthew McConaughey as Archduke Franz Ferdinand), and a wonderfully offensive mumblecore version of The Diary of Anne Frank. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Do not resuscitate" and 5 being "Infectiously good," Love in the Time of Swine Flu gets a 2.5.