THEATER: Violence Is Hard to Understand, So Let's Be Vague and Comedic About It

Photo/Sandra Coudert

Writer/director Adam Rapp's latest play, Through the Yellow Hour, has once again transformed the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater: one enters through a narrow graffitied corridor as blue-bonneted women stamp zeroes onto your neck and solemnly tell you that "You have been accounted for." Passing through a curtain made of garbage bags, the interior is a bombed-out ruin: the stage's ceiling has caved in, the walls are stripped and rusty, and emergency bulbs are strung across the walls like a most decidedly unfestive series of Christmas lights. Percussive gunfire echoes through invisible surround-sound speakers; the sound of explosions shake through the floor's subwoofer. There is, incidentally, a body on stage, sprawled in a drug-induced stupor by the clawed leg of a bathtub.

We're at some point in the future, in what remains of Ellen's (Hani Furstenberg) Lower East Side apartment; if the stakes are not already set high enough by Andromache Chalfant's amazing set design and Christian Frederickson's haunting soundscape, the play begins with Ellen shooting an insane intruder (Brian Mendes) and leaving his corpse in the corner -- "He adds texture to the room," she jokes, grimly. And so long as Rapp remains vague about things, focused more on the micro -- day-to-day survival -- and less on the macro -- the potentially Muslim "Egg Heads" who attacked the United States with germs and proceeded to castrate the men -- these textures are more than evocative enough to carry us Through the Yellow Hour.

In the first of three scenes, Ellen, a former nurse, barters for the infant child of Maude (Danielle Slavick), and it's a heartbreaking introduction to the dire toughness both women have bottled up within them. They have each turned to self-medication and have bartered their sex as needed, and the line between the two -- if any -- seems arbitrarily defined by the fact that Ellen has a stash of drugs, supplies, and a half-functional weapon. In the equally effective second scene, Hakim (Alok Tewari), brings news of the death of Ellen's husband -- with whom he was tortured and castrated -- and we see the depths of her determination as she forces Hakim, at gunpoint, to provide every detail of their treatment, even as she retches, weeps, and collapses to the floor. In a Dilaudid-dosed dreamstate, time -- and reality -- slips away.

The third and final scene, however, is on far shakier territory, and exposes the dangers of having a vague plot, a drifting story, a "lost" world. The theme is clear: whereas Ellen originally clung to the idea of having the baby that she and her husband had not been able to (and now might never have the opportunity to) conceive, she can no longer stomach having a child on her own, and turns instead to angelically untouched visitors (Joanne Tucker and Matt Pilieci) from a eugenics-like farm that aims to rebreed and rebuild the world, trading them her baby for a fourteen-year-old boy. (By which I mean an innocent, still-functioning penis.) Beyond the fact that this is a screaming deus ex machina that violates the internal logic of the play, the scene itself lacks the human connection produced by the claustrophobic scenes that preceded it (the second scene takes place largely in the dark), and falls too easily into a benevolent poetry. It also calls far too much attention to the unfleshed Big Ideas of the play -- War, Hope, Survival -- and the fact that Rapp has nothing new to say about them.

The same can be said for Jon Kern's Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them, which I didn't like any more when it was written by Christopher Durang and called Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. (To be clear, they're different plays. Also, a slight disclaimer: I briefly worked alongside Jon Kern at a former job.) The play doesn't officially open until October 17th, so take some if not all of the following with a grain of salt, but this slapstick-y production, which asserts that its aim is to humanize its trio of terrorists -- young would-be-martyr Rahim (Utkarsh Ambudkar), embittered supporter Yalda (Nitya Vidyasagar), and the delusional brains of the operation, Qala (William Jackson Harper) -- never really manages to slow down enough to connect. Throw in their stoner neighbor, Jerome (Steven Boyer), who believes that he's finally found a purpose, and the whole thing is just a joke factory. Strong as the performances might be, Peter DeBuois's broad direction hasn't yet found a way to focus on the sweetness shared between Rahim and Yalda, nor has it managed to find a way to pave over the gaping plotholes required to keep Jerome onstage.

The problem with Modern Terrorism is that it attempts to be taken seriously -- which is a bit like expecting an episode in which Bart befriends an innocent boy whose parents are plotting to overload Springfield's nuclear reactor to actually mean something. (I bring this up because Kern now writes on the staff of The Simpsons). I'm a huge fan of William Jackson Harper; that his portrayal of Qala reeks so utterly of Wile E. Coyote seems more a failing of the script than the actor. (The same might be said of the shades of Scooby-Doo's Shaggy in Boyer's role.) The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity used the buffoonery of professional wrestling to actually make a point; Modern Terrorism can't stop snickering at the sight of Rahim wearing a tightly-pinching underwear bomb, or at his cultural obsession with Star Wars -- at least, not long enough to give emotional weight to the fact that Yalda's innocent husband was accidentally blown up by an American missile, or that culture can just as easily unite as divide us.

It's not as if the play's final image -- two humans (nothing more, nothing less) huddled together, sharing a song through an iPod -- isn't an effective one. It's merely that, even with blood seriously splattered across a wall, it feels stale and unearned. We shouldn't just "get" the message of the play -- it should sneak up on us.

THEATER: 3C

Photo/Joan Marcus

Why are sitcoms so popular in America? Perhaps it's because nothing bad ever really seems to happen, at least nothing that can't be shrugged off and reset by the end of the episode. David Adjmi's intriguing remix of Three's Company, 3C, takes the opposite approach: nothing good happens, and the powerful spate of laughter that serves as the climax of the show is quickly followed, and ultimately stifled, by a deadening silence. 

The sitcom conventions are all there, most notably in the outlandish landlords, mentally unbalanced Mrs. Wicker (Kate Buddeke) and horrifically racist Mr. Wicker (Bill Buell). But the thematic structure of the play can be summed up by its subversion: a massive series of comic misunderstandings lead the fastidious florist Linda (Hannah Cabell) to first believe that their Night at the Roxbury-like neighbor Terry (Eddie Cahill) is sticking his dick in the nose of her ditsy, promiscuous roommate Connie (Anna Chlumsky) -- they're actually doing coke. ("How can I feel good when I have all of this white stuff coming out of my nostrils?") Her prudishness makes it difficult to explain this to her new roommate, Brad (Jake Silbermann), which leads him to believe that she's figured out that he's actually gay -- not just pretend gay, to fool the landlords -- an issue that makes her condemnations -- "I'm sick, you're making me sick to my stomach" -- wound him even more. Likewise, when Connie comforts this former Vietnam soldier, trying to get him to confront his trauma, he mistakes her solidarity as a confession that she's a lesbian: "Just today I was with someone [at the beach]. It felt nice. I love getting all wet." 

Jackson Gay does a terrific job of staging all the beats of this production: pratfalls for clumsy Brad ("Is there some sort of insupportable weight you're carrying?"), striking one-liners for Connie ("I just get lonely and needy. Boy, I hope I don't get raped!"), and a whole series of elaborate dance sequences choreographed by Deney Terrio that express the ways in which Linda attempts to get out of the body that she feels trapped in. Gay's also absolutely brutal and unrelenting in the pacing, so when Mr. Wicker abruptly starts masturbating an unwilling Linda, or when Terry's "faggot" teasing turns violent, the shifts are shocking, as if the characters in a Nickelodeon cartoon abruptly started acting as if they were in an HBO drama. The cast, without exception, is exceptional, with particular attention given to Cabell and Chlumsky, who get the lion's share of reversals and breakdowns. 

The best example of Adjimi's technique can be seen in a simple game called "Faces," which Brad and Linda play in an attempt to cheer each other up (or, more literally, to mask their true feelings). One person calls out an emotion, the other person displays it: elated, anxious. But whereas a sitcom might leave things at this level -- broad strokes of showing, not telling -- Adjimi digs deeper, demands more: carefree, with an undercurrent of fanaticism. These are things that shouldn't -- can't, really -- go together, and yet these contradictions are part of the all-too-human condition. Is it any surprise that Linda breaks down for real after attempting to convey "Anguish, with an undercurrent of sexiness"? That could just as easily be her life, or at least, it could be, if she only had the confidence to embrace her looks. 

Don't dismiss 3C, then, as being simple or silly, although it is, at times, both those things. If you like, you're welcome to try to laugh it all off -- surely we've come a long way since this 1978 setting -- but you'll most likely find, as these unlikely roommates do, that we're terrifyingly stuck in some ugly conventions and some uglier lies. Tune in, turn on, don't drop out.