THEATER: Red Dog Howls

Photo/Joan Marcus

The thing you need to know about Red Dog Howls, before you get frustrated or restless, is that Alexander Dinelaris is deliberately pacing his play in a fashion that will pay off, to spectacular results, by the finale. To that end, the bland narrative device through which Michael Kiriakos (Alfredo Narciso) addresses the audience -- often to repeat, foreshadow, or stress things you've just or are about to see -- can be forgiven. Likewise Dinelaris's insistence on cryptic exchanges between Michael and his so-underutilized-she-might-as-well-have-been-written-out-of-the-play wife, Gabriella (Florencia Lozano): it's the opposite of exposition. Here, characters dance, Lost-like, around things they would normally address by name -- the contents of a mysterious letter, a person's identity -- although, thankfully, never for very long. The point, ultimately, is that Michael is spending the play finding, after his father's death, a connection to his Armenian past that he never knew, thanks to his stumbling upon a believed-to-be-dead grandmother, Rose (Kathleen Chalfant).

And lo, Chalfant is amazing, a real treasure of the stage. Though she's playing a mysterious and heavily accented woman who insists on stitching strange names onto baby pillows, never eating in company, and trying to prepare her grandson mentally and physically for something horrific -- "You must be strong" -- she's at the same time almost always sympathetic and relateable, if not entirely understandable. Chalfant gets the best of both worlds in this character, too, for she inhabits the peculiar physicality of both this 91-year-old woman and her secret reservoir of strength, such that Rose can bring Michael to a stalemate when arm-wrestling him. Whether you want to call this a riddle wrapped in a nutshell or whatever, you can't keep your eyes off of her, you can't keep your heart from leaping out to her, and you can't stop listening to her -- even when, as the subject matter turns to the atrocities of the Armenian genocides, you might want to.

This Howl is not a Ginsburg-like explosion; it's a slow-burning keening that shifts from a growl to a wail to an all-too-intelligible guttural sound. And as it is a play both about identity and forgiveness, it more than earns both: despite a few early and only perhaps semi-flawed scenes (depending on your perspective), this is a production -- and a performance -- that will live screaming within you.

PLAY: "A Hard Heart"

Photo/Carol Rosegg

[This is the expanded version of the post that just went up on Show Business Weekly.]

Two unnamed nations, in an unspecified time and at an uncertain place, are at war. Praxis (Melissa Friedman) is fast becoming the queen of a wasteland that is relentlessly under siege, and so she places her trust and her armies in the hands of a genius, Riddler (Kathleen Chalfant). Riddler delights in the task, finding a perverse but logical pleasure in outwitting the savages at the gates and in knowing that she is saving her whimpering son, the comically named Atilla (James Wallert), from certain death in the army. But her methods are ruthless, calling for such self-mutilating sacrifice, that she might as well be the enemy, a thought that prompts Praxis to mournfully rue her decision: "There are deaths and deaths..." So too, there are plays and then there are plays, and this magnificently perceptive look at what protecting the hearts (of our nation and of our selves) takes: that's a real play.

Howard Barker, who wrote the play in 1992, is much like Riddler: his genius writing seems to take real pleasure in running paces around its own character and running logic and politics to their bitter conclusion, yet he also finds the humanity in every character, from the muted general, Plevna (Dion Graham) to Seemore (Thom Sesma), a man insanely infatuated with Riddler's calm poise and perfect genius. Barker can just as easily play in the subtle ruination of war (like Dr. Seuss's The Butter Battle Book) as he can draw parallels between the way madness manifests itself: in Riddler's case as a pent-up and focused talent that allows her to remain aloof enough to spend human lives like inflated currency, in Seemore's case as an unleashed and erratic emotion that violently flows out of him into the absolute valuation of a single human life.

A Hard Heart finds the harsh but supple direction it needs in Will Pomerantz, who is filled with clever surprises. The play is set within and around a fortified structure that looks to be solid and tough, but its exterior unfolds, like paper, to expose an empty shell within. As the play progresses, destruction is signified not with physical damage, but by scattering heaps of tattered clothing around the stage, like bodiless corpses. More so, Pomerantz never misses a chance to include the audience in the action: Seemore is frequently dragged down the aisle, kicking and screaming, and when Praxis and Riddler talk of sacrificing their greatest asset -- the very "bottomless significance" that they fight for -- it is us that they are addressing.

Barker is not an easy playwright to perform (he calls his own theatrical style Catastrophism; the company that most frequently performs him is known as The Wrestling School). His sentences don't just run on, they run through themselves, constantly attacking themselves with sudden realizations, as when a flustered Atilla blurts out "The collar and the cuffs You are thriving on this siege and I am not so nicely stitched . . ." All the actors nail the intricacies of such text, especially Friedman, who carries herself with all the poise, grace, flair, and wit of some famous Spanish queen, only to constantly be surprised by the whispering voice of her own heart, a heart which must suddenly be heard.

A Hard Heart is not at all a hard play to highly recommend: its heroes may find only tragedy in triumph, but this remarkable ensemble will find only success in their nightly suffering.