THEATER: Mistakes Were Made

[Originally published in Show Business Weekly]

Photo/Ari Mintz

How do you put an original play on Broadway? To Craig Wright, the comically dazzling writer of Mistakes Were Made, it involves selling out your playwright, placating your celebrity, denigrating everyone else’s agent, threatening the theatrical bookers, and, oh, a little bit of overseas negotiation with angry Afghanis and truckloads of sheep. Don't be fooled by the title: It’s just more of the show’s self-deprecating insider wit. Between director Dexter Bullard and the Atlas-like performer Michael Shannon (poised to devour Jeremy Piven's career), there's not a single mistake in this outstanding one-man farce.

The show begins with cheapo producer Felix Artifex (he’s done Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Erik Estrada and Rosanne Barr) assuring the star he's wrangling that his only job is to do what's right for other people. It's not long before he switches phone lines, however, to butter up the playwright with some complementary lies ("He loves the script: his words, not mine") before suggesting a few rewrites. "Life is unbearable and short," he says of this epic French Revolution play, "and people want to be entertained." However, as the phone lines begin to light up faster and faster, driving Artifex to pace around the room on headset, a cartoonish, suspender-clasping caricature — but one with good intentions and a generous heart (watch him feed his fish) — the lies and the stakes grow larger.

Mistakes Were Made is filled with absurdity, but since it's all handled over the phone, filtered through Shannon's gravel-serious cajoling and chiseled horror (his eyes grow rather wide, his jaw plummets precipitously, his hair seems to grow whiter), we get caught up in what would otherwise be a shallow situation. (Consider the way Mark Rylance elevated Boeing Boeing.) Additionally, the novelty of verbal reversals (as opposed to physical pivots) reinvigorates the farce: because he's forced to work from his desk, without the ability for actual violence, his energies are channeled and amplified, as is his pitiable and ultimately helpless situation. It makes Shannon seem simultaneously subdued and frenetic, psychopathic yet endearing, and — in the biggest reversal of all — allows him to play against his normally dead-serious types (Boardwalk Empire, Bug).

Here's the lesson: When it comes to theater, there's no mistaking talent.

THEATER: Bottom of the World

 

Photo/Ari Mintz

[Reviewed for Show Business Weekly]

The Aliens

Photo/Sara Krulwich

Reviewed for Show Business Weekly

Imagine you’re a shy 17-year-old boy in Vermont, waiting for your senior year to start, but really just waiting — waiting for something, anything, to happen. One day, at your new summer job, you run into a loiterer named Jasper and his friend KJ. You mumble something about the management’s rules, but Jasper just offers you a cigarette, so calmly and coolly ignoring you that it seems like a mark of respect. “You gotta’ read Bukowski,” he says, and then you realize he’s actually paying attention to you. “He cuts through all the bullshit.”

Annie Baker cuts through the bullshit, too. Her sweet and simple plays forgo plot in favor of intimate character studies, taking pleasure in small hopes and dreams. Her latest, The Aliens, centers on Jasper (Erin Gann), as he channels the depression resulting from his latest failed relationship into his novel. (“She would sleep with her head pressed so hard against his chest that he’d wake up with bruises.”) The play also follows the Dude-like KJ (Michael Chernus), who attempts to define his own depression with mathematical logic, but settles instead for the steadier diet of ‘shrooms and Zen philosophy: “The state of having just lost something is like the most enlightened state in the world.” Between these two is Evan (Dane DeHann), a shy boy hoping to find a purpose in their encouraging presence.

Baker is joined, once again, by the clear-eyed director Sam Gold (Circle Mirror Transformation), and their collaboration is mundanely profound, finding the poetry of realism by getting to the root of the text. (This is reflected in Jasper’s literary style and KJ’s floundering attempts to explain how something is explained.) KJ breaks down, repeating a single word for three minutes, but the word is just a means of communicating something deeper, richer. Likewise, when Evan sings “If I Had a Hammer,” it ceases to be a stupid song: Instead, his tone tells the story, building from embarrassment to sweet sorrow before learning to let go by the final verse.

It’s hard to watch The Aliens without falling for its characters, without getting sucked in to its so-simple world — and it’s easy to do so, with no divide between the actors and their more-than-believable characters. It’s difficult to describe Baker’s language with mere quotes: It’s just everyday dialogue. Moreover, it’s impossible not to rave about this show, whose world is simple only in lurid comparison to the Technicolor one seen on “reality” TV. Baker’s language is normal, yes, but it is riveting in its openness; her characters remind us that the “little frictions” are the ones that are hardest to bear, because they cannot be prepared for.

Post No Bills

[First posted to Show Business Weekly]

Photo/Sandra Coudet

“It’s real when you hit bottom,” says Esteban (Teddy Cañez), who knows what he’s talking about. He was once the Mexican Johnny Cash and now busks in the Port Authority subway. “I don’t understand,” replies Reyna (Audrey Esparza), a nervy, orphaned runaway who—thanks to the gimmicky miracles of theatrical shorthand—has become this gruff loner’s protégée. Like all buddy dramas, in which two opposites come together and learn a valuable lesson from one another, Esteban comforts her: “Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out.” However, playwright Mando Alvarado has yet to do so. Post No Bills has some good musical bits (composed by Sandra Rubio) and entertaining co-stars—the blind, urban sage Sal (John-Martin Green) and the late-twenties hipster Eddie (Wade Allain-Marcus)—Alvarado is too carefully following in the footsteps of other plays to ever risk hitting the bottom.

Too bad: his actors certainly seem game. Esparza is a coil of lightning, able to bunch herself in and then explode outward, and her childish goofiness helps to gloss over some of the weaker plot points. (One minute she’s threatening to stick a bazooka up his ass, the next she’s staying with him?) Cañez is naturally brooding, and his deep voice helps him show the pain of his music; these qualities help him surprise us each time he reveals a third dimension: Esteban’s feelings for Reyna. And though Sal and Eddie are written largely as devices for these two, Green finds the anger behind his comic relief, and Allain-Marcus turns his energy into an outsized shyness that works for his romance with Reyna and rivalry with Esteban.

It’s also a waste of Michael Ray Escamilla’s direction; the man knows how to spin a story with visuals, and he fills the empty gaps in Alvarado’s script with cute sight gags (watch Sal), but for the majority of the play, the set is just a blue-washed wall—the sort you see for subway construction. There’s terrific storytelling, both from him and designer Raul Abrego, when those walls part to reveal Esteban’s studio apartment, so it’s a shame that the play itself still seems to be under construction.

Killers and Other Family

[First posted to Show Business Weekly on 9/28]

Photo/Sandra Coudert

Not much happens during the first two minutes of Lucy Thurber’s Killers and Other Family: Lizzie (Samantha Soule) is sitting on the couch of her New York City apartment, working on her dissertation as Regina Spektor plays on the radio. Call it a last glimpse of normality, or the quiet before the storm, but it’s a clear choice by director Caitriona McLaughlin, and one that greatly informs the first ominous knock on Lizzie’s door. It’s not as immediately clear what the second, shorter silence means, as the door swings open and Lizzie sees not her lover, Claire (Aya Cash), but her brother, Jeff (Dashiell Eaves), and his best friend, Danny (Shane McRae), their thick, ragged jackets a reminder of the dangerous country they're from.

Their arrival will eventually lead to bad things — a fact Lizzie realizes and tries her best to prevent — but what this silence really represents is that recognizable violence can come as a welcome relief all that stifling intellectual tedium. Though Lizzie may protest (rightly so, given Danny's once-upon-a-time abuses), she’s simultaneously--and unwillingly--comforted by this familiar danger. Unlike the hidden struggles of the civilized world, she already knows her family’s savage rules. (Indeed, the moment Lizzie looks most frightened is when Jeff presses her to explain what she’ll do after becoming a scholar.)

It’s this trick — and the simultaneously exciting and terrifying performances of the cast (especially Soule, who has to play in both worlds) — that keeps Killers and Other Family from simply being an urban nightmare. For the first act, things are largely repressed, with the tension masked by nonchalance. The second act seems like Funny Games, in which two soft-spoken gentlemen increasingly violate the boundaries of an innocent family — except that it’s really about whether or not Lizzie can actually escape something that is an intrinsic part of who she is. Sure, Danny's a killer, but Jeff and Lizzie both shout this feeble explanation at a sobbing Claire: "He didn't mean it!"

Thurber’s wild play is justified by this familiar and haunting thought: There are some things about ourselves that we cannot control. Then again, some things are inexcusable, and those who are not a fan of in-yer-face theater may run for the doors.

What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends

[Reviewed for Show Business Weekly]

Matt (Todd D’Amour) isn’t the guy who has no friends; he’s the guy who, hating small talk, suddenly realizes that he hates all of his friends. Celia (Carrie Keranen) isn’t the queen bee of a literal cult of personality, The Friends; she’s the girl who, desiring to be alone, makes everyone desire her. It’s only natural that these two should fall in terrifically dysfunctional love in Larry Kunofsky’s new play, What to Do When You Hate All Your Friends. And even though the play isn’t nearly as antisocial as it bills itself, it’s a charismatically winning parable.

That story is presented by Enid (Amy Staats), a “lower-case-F friend” who swims between being a tentative character and the tenacious narrator, often delightfully blurring the line. (“I’m not here. Just act like I’m not here.”) This comic device immediately justifies the quirks of the drama, but also turns the so-called “impersonal” attitudes into some very personal scenes, coming off as a cross between a Kelly Link short story and a Sarah Ruhl drama. Director Jacob Krueger wisely roots things more in the realistic than the magical, but leaves himself the room for cartoon-like effects (as when characters pop their heads out from a wall) and image-heavy metaphors (like the slow-motion, sandwich-eating conclusion).

None of this would matter, of course, if the cast weren’t so loveable. They go about making everything anti-antisocial, from Susan Louise O’Connor’s cute breakdowns in a variety of roles to Josh Lefkowitz’s full-circle turns from playing an easygoing square to an attention-starved lawyer. D’Amour, always a physically confident actor (he’s built for Shepard and Williams), turns that muscle to comedy: his grand mal seizure of a bear hug draws the biggest laughs of the night. Meanwhile, Keranen matches him by channeling a husky intensity beneath her fragile exterior: an anonymous yet mutual masturbation session comes across as Sesame Street Gone Wild. Staats, however, steals the show. Her specific yet fluttery actions are more representative of Kunofsky’s message than anything else: a genuine love that is destined to never come together.