OPERA: "Don Giovanni"

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Although Don Giovanni is part of the opera-for-all program at New York City Opera, I guess it will always be that opera just isn't for all. In Hal Prince's production the limp trees are well-met by the limpid supertitles, and Susan Stroman's choreography, deliberate and symmetrical, could've come from a school on formless etiquette. Opera is built on long stretches of exposition, and nothing is ever said or done easily, but the trade off is that these sometimes mundane things are at least beautiful in the undertaking. Well, the only thing beautiful is the undertaking of Don Giovanni's soul, by a fantastically costumed Statue (the makeup artist ought to be credited). There are voices that are phenomenal, like Julianna Di Giacomo's Donna Elvira -- but squinting across miles of rows to see her pained expression takes away from what you hear in her soul. And you can tell that Daniel Mobbs is properly hamming up Leporello--you even laugh here and there, yourself--but when he sings, the orchestra washes his low baritone away. The debut performances of Mardi Byers, Aaron St. Clair Nicholson, and JiYoung Li (Donna Anna, Don Giovanni, and Zerlina) are perfunctory, with moments of mellifluousness, but nothing that you would call a breakout. I don't claim to be an expert on opera, so take this sand-grained post as opinion more than review, but this traditional Don Giovanni seemed to lack soul from the start.

NOTE: For more information on New York City Opera's inspired and ambitious, season-long OPERA-FOR-ALL program of $25 orchestra tickets, you can read my thoughts at metaDRAMA or just skip directly to their ordering site, here.

PLAY: "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Photo/Michal Daniel

To quote Shakespeare, Helena makes a heaven of hell. Martha Plimpton usually delivers (see The Coast of Utopia), so yes, I'll follow her, to "die upon the hand I love so well." Of course, there is no hell to be found in Daniel Sullivan's direction of A Midsummer Night's Dream, only magic. The First Fairy (Chelsea Bacon) does acrobatic burlesque with her tongue and body as she swings from branch to branch, easily purring her text, and Laila Robin's Titania plays footsie both with her words and her stockinged legs. Puck (Jon Michael Hill) is a magician who does slight of hand as much with his own spry self as with his multicolored cloths, and the faeries, creepy children straight out of Tim Burton's "innocence," give way to bucolic ditties in Oberon's (Keith David) deep dulcet tones. One never thinks "poor Bottom" in the light of such theatrical antics, much less Jay O. Sanders, who "brays" that role to great effect, nor does Sullivan dwell on the wild, unspoken violence: when it boils over, it is in stylized and greatly comic choreography, as Demetrius, Lysander, Helena, and Hermia all fly at one another in the name of love. The energy that Sullivan's achieved in this production is the true fairy dust that gives this Dream wings: reason and love, it's true, keep little company together.

PLAY: "100 Saints You Should Know"

The following is a preview of 100 Saints You Should Know, which opens September 18th. I do recommend it, so a discount offer is posted below, or right here. Playwrights Horizon, according to artistic director Tim Sanford, has a rushed rehearsal period and then a lengthy period of previews that allow them to use audience talk backs to grow and mature the play, with the idea being that they're a company for the development of new works and the strengthening of a playwright. I fully endorse this, although I do think that they should charge less for the first week (again, that's why I've included the discount). Setting monetary issues aside, at the matinée performance I attended on Sunday, September 2nd, we were all assured that very little would be changed, and while I can't say for sure that everything will be improved, I have faith (pun intended) -- particularly in the confidence of director Ethan McSweeny -- that the actors will deepen their connections to the Kate Fodor's already well written script.

100 Saints You Should Know places its story beneath an innocuous layer, not condemning anyone, but not saving them either. This matches the Church's conceit, well spoken by Father Matthew (Jeremy Shamos), that everybody is filled with evil, but is redeemable. However, Fodor puts this theory to the test: Theresa's (Janel Moloney) reckless lifestyle has led her to a dead-end job with Magic Maids, the only bright spot of which is her twice-a-week cleaning of Matthew's rectory. Her current boyfriend abuses her, as does her teenager daughter, Abby (Zoe Kazan), a selfish, rebellious girl who displaces all her self-loathing onto others.

As Theresa seeks religious answers, Matthew questions his own faith when the Church forces him to take a reflective vacation, where he can examine the urgings that brought him to savor the male nudes of George Platt Lynes. He does so by spending time with his simple mother, Colleen (Lois Smith), a creature of habit and intense faith, clinging to both because she has nothing else. But his quiet solitude is shattered by a random encounter with Garrett (Will Rogers), an awkward, somewhat retarded teen who looks to Matthew (a man his father calls a fag) as the only one who may understand the twin surges of joy and disgust that he gets from looking at male porn.

On the surface, everything is innocent: Theresa drags Abby with her on a road trip to find Matthew, and Garrett leaps at the chance to have a friend in Abby. But the heart is a more complex thing: whether or not Matthew is gay, but he is cut off from his own body and has never received the warm, unconditional love he craves, not even from his mother (who was simply raised in different times). Abby doesn't really want to be a bitch, but at the same time, after being so helpless, she has grown to enjoy feeling empowered. And Theresa, albeit repentant, knows little about how to interact with her daughter.

Ethan McSweeny directs the production with a stern, mechanical hand (chiaroscuro sliding walls of greenish gray subdivide scenes that revolve around an imposing, leafless metal tree) that fills more and more with life (as the scenes continue, the walls continue to fall away, to much better effect here than in Bartlett Sher's direction of Awake and Sing). Like Fodor, he doesn't offer any answers in his minimalist staging, but it's obvious that he's worked with the cast to delve into the subtext, as what's really continually on display are the actors. Lois Smith is the standout, completely losing herself (especially after the dreadful Surface to Air) in a role that offers the least obvious needs. Transformative, with her booming first words and lilting afterthoughts, Smith also gives Shamos clear and immediate needs to play against, and his frustration is all the more visible when set against that indomitable will.

Moloney also delivers a great performance as a reserved woman, tight as her jeans, who tries to release the baggage of the past. Her struggle is internal, captured in a barely maintained frown, and yet we can see it throughout, even when it's not exploding outward against her daughter. As for Shamos, though he begins by somewhat telegraphing his reactions (a habit, perhaps, from Gutenberg! The Musical!), his performance grows more natural, until by the second act, with his confessions of confusion, he achieves the tenderest moment in the theater this year (a simple touch, filled with heartbreaking beauty). With Rogers, there's a lanky eagerness in him that makes him likable, which is a real feat given how over-the-top his character's been written; Kazan, on the other hand, has all-too-believable dialog, and simply needs to go a little deeper in the second act to transform a good performance into a masterful one.

Ultimately, 100 Saints You Should Know is shaping up to be a very sincere show, filled with outstanding performances and some achingly beautiful moments. Perhaps it's too much to ask that you know a hundred saints, but try hard to see this everyday one.

PLAY: FRINGE, "Lights Rise on Grace"

Five words, six years, three things. Three actors, three chairs, a series of light cues. But Chad Beckim's brilliant new play, Lights Rise on Grace is anything but by the numbers. Told through parallel monologues that evolve into fully fleshed scenes, Beckim uses the repetition of events and the shuffling of time and perspective to unify the three disparate roles into one. Along with Robert O'Hara's seamless direction, he transforms the spotlights into prisons and the actors into a contemporary urban chorus, catcalling disses from the background. This, while moving at a rapid pace that compresses three lives and ten years into a tight sixty minutes.

What I most admire about Beckim (and I said this once before about his play, 'nami) is that his appropriately named "Partial Comfort" productions has mastered the removal of "villains." This allows him to fairly paint Grace (Ali Ahn) as a sweet, innocent girl at the same time that she's a rebellious American to her Chinese parents, and to make her chaste, even when she talks about mindlessly fucking men on her back, on all fours, &c. It lets Large (Jaime Lincoln Smith) be a smooth-talking, street-smart Romeo, but allows him to keep the purity of that same Romeo. It allows him to feel real remorse at "untying the knot" and paralyzing his brother. It lets Riece (Alexander Alioto, more focussed and slick than in last year's Nelson) seduce and "corrupt" Large, while at the same time making him a genuine best friend; a good godfather, even if he's an ex-convict who killed a person or two. More than anything else, Beckim's plays allow us to truly sympathize with the characters, to understand situations that most of us will not encounter. It's a credit to the actors--especially the vulnerability of the deep voiced Smith--that we go so far as to believe those situations as well.

As for O'Hara, he directs with the same, smooth technique that won him an Obie for In the Continuum; here, as there, he allows darkness to play as walls, lets the characters define their own boundaries, and makes the most out of space, particularly when he compresses and pulls the trio together in silent commiseration. O'Hara understands that the theater doesn't need fancy gadgets and flashing lights; it just needs storytellers, and he's a master of accentuating the small nuances that tell more than any strobe light might ever imply.

Lights Rise on Grace is a simple story of the human heart, one that looks beyond race, sex, and orientation to remain true to that ever-pumping organ we all share. That is what makes it so compelling, and so beautiful.

PLAY: FRINGE, "I Dig Doug"

Unless you followed the campaign trail of '04 (specifically the rise and fall of Howard Dean), there's a lot that you won't dig about I Dig Doug, an erratic, straining, and yet occasionally charming show about politics. The play is fun on account of Karen DiConcetto, who plays one of those unnamed, mass-market generated, self-proclaimedly vapid, girls who blogs about reality TV and falls in love with the struggles of those most real people and their hardest of hardships. But Rochelle Zimmerman, her co-writer and co-performer, makes it wearisome: not because of her acting, but because of the redundant shallowness of her convictionless characters.

Like one-line cameos from a sitcom's supporting cast, Zimmerman's multiple personalities are cardboard cutouts, when they should be cutups, and this turns I Dig Doug into heartless satire, as superficial and vapid as the main character. It takes a deus ex machina to justify the over-the-top narrative that waylays our Iowa-bound heroines with heartbroken waitresses, rifle-toting terrorists and Utopian Communist hippies. Bert V. Royal's direction only emphasizes the shallow choices, particularly the unambitious and fairly standard half-lit scene changes to irrelevant yet loud pop music. It accommodates the costume changes, but it does little else, just as the play speaks to the laughable state of politics, but affects little else.

For every well thought out moment, like Girl's explanation of why Doug's policies are important and relevant to her rich and mindless friend, there's a needless and unfunny joke (the buzzing vibrator, the half-whispered moan of Doug's name). The disconnected scene structure doesn't help much either: the story is made to serve the needs of the jokes. What the show really needs is a manager and a media team; someone willing to put the right spin on all the chaotic gags. If that's done, then I Dig Doug could actually run for something.