PLAY: "I Used to Write on Walls"

Photo: Working Man’s Clothes/DARR Publicity

Working Man's Clothes has another gripping, visceral hit on their hands, following up on Penetrator with Bekah Brunstetter's I Used to Write on Walls. Not that there aren't blemishes on that wall, or that the chalk Brunstetter uses to pen her play doesn't snap at a bunch of places; it's just that the overwhelming mood of the piece, from Georgia's beat poetry to Mona's mania to Anna's precociously dirty mouth, is one of lurking hilarity. And while the connection of disparate characters (four women, one wild surfer dude) isn't as strong as, say Six Degrees of Separation, it's fresh, hip, and a lot of fun.

The credit for much of that falls to the cast, who don't drop a beat, even when speaking a blend of the ridiculous and beautiful (i.e., "Teeth are the dirty little secret of your face."). Every line sounds natural and crisp, especially those from Diane (a gifted Maggie Hamilton), a vulnerable cop who we first meet leaving a lengthy, bubbly message with her date from the previous night, full of justifications, weak mirthless laughs (like hiccups), and a barely withheld desperation: "Thanks for the sex," she says, closing the phone. Then, looking at it quizzically, "Talk to you again never."

Like most of the women in this play, Diane is smart, and well aware of her faults: she just isn't able to stop them. Anna's mother (Rachel Dorfman), for instance, has to keep telling her beautiful daughter not to look her in the face because it burns her: if she could, she would just steal that face. Joanne (a loose and very pleasant Darcie Champagne) introduces herself to Diane with an acknowledgment that she usually doesn't have much self-confidence, as she hates her vagina. And Trevor (Jeff Berg, whose experience playing Tom Cruise has really paid off here), the "raddest philosopher ever" who they all admire, keeps sinking into woman after woman as a way of punishing himself before God for leaving his one true love behind. Not all of these exaggerated traits work, for instance, the dotty sadist, Mona (a terrifyingly good Ellen David), works more to wake something up in Trevor than she does as an actual character. And the daughter, Anna (Chelsey Shannon), is more a comic device than a need for the play. That said, she's still delightful, which is how Brunstetter gets away with her odd moments.

As co-directed by Diana Basmajian and Isaac Byrne, I Used to Write on Walls flies by in a rush. Even the intermission seems swift, with the first act energizing the audience in the same way as coffee (it almost shouldn't be, but it is). The second act gets a little cramped on stage, as the direction starts to blur the boundaries of each scene, but if sets and lighting are what WMC has to skimp on to produce shows like this, then so be it (read: donate money). I Used to Write on Walls refers to that personal sliver of regret we all have that we don't still do the things we used to. Thankfully, refreshingly so, Bekah Brunstetter hasn't given up on illustrating them to us.

PLAY: "Start Up" (GTA's Road Theater USA)

Start Up is destined to be one of those plays that is more remembered for its vehicle (an obnoxiously green school bus on a sixteen-state road trip to bring theater to the heart of America) than for its concept. That's unfortunate, because the actual ideas of this play are some of Roland Schimmelpfennig's strongest, and certainly the most accessible for America. (No surprise, it was written for our uncultured shores.) Our three ambitious and clueless German heroes (Kati, Rob, and Micha) have come pursuing the loftiest of American dreams. They want to start a business, yes, but not an easily marketable one: they want to theatrically share German culture. Instead, the proprietor, Ike, keeps pleading that they open a video store instead ("There's a real need for a video store").

So what's more important: culture or capitalism? It's a very good question to be asking, especially for theater, an enterprise which isn't always economically feasible. GTA, a company run by actor Ronald Marx (who last brought us the 2006 Stadttheater at HERE Arts Center), is looking to do both, by boldly marketing eccentric modern shows not just to New Yorkers, but to those who would be tourists, and he'll be bringing the theater to Kentucky, Tennessee, George, Arizona, and a lot of other hub cities that we wouldn't normally associate German theater with.

To handle such an enterprise, however, GTA has turned to a shaky multimedia presentation that keeps getting in our faces, only to back away. Start Up starts up by pumping the audience up with the Rocky theme, but then plunges them into a darkness lit only by the tech team's open laptop computers and a microwave that is steadily working its way through a popcorn bag. Later, Micha and Liz start to get a little wild and crazy, only for the show to cut to a lengthy documentary-style segment that follows Rob, Kati, and Ike as they journey around NYC to get food. (This segment may have been filmed live, but it hardly matters: theater is never as raw as it is when it's directly in front of us.)

The only place where this works is when the pace breaks so that Micha can lecture us (complete with PowerPoint slides) on Germany's economic fall and rise ("Nobody remembers the Marshall plan anymore"). It's a ballsy demonstration of the very type of "theater" that nobody likes to sit through, but it's necessary for contrast with the only types of conversations Ike (the American) can have with anyone outside his culture, with films as a sort of bastardized universal language. America is, according to the characters, "a country of cinematography," and it's not hard to see that: clips of Das Boot segue into recently filmed segments of the touring Germans in front of local landmarks (like Doc Holliday's over on 10th and A, or Coney Island), and conversations often wax on a yearning for the Western vistas of rolling hills (one scene overlaps one such rustic monologue with a lengthy zoomed tracking shot of New Yorkers walking by PS 122).

The filmed portions of Start Up are a little hard to take in; Schimmelpfennig's writing works best in close proximity, where he can still surprise you with an act of violence (Start Up happens to be calm and demonstrative, but Roland Sands, as Ike, is able to at least threaten it at any moment). On stage, it's also easier to see the talents of the cast, who act so casually familiar with one another that it really does almost feel like we're intruding on their business affairs, even when there's a panel of people on laptops stage left, or a boom mike operator following them around. Which, you know, really does sound a lot like America after all.

PLAY: "The Ritz" and "Mauritius"

Photos/Joan Marcus

Mauritius

Stamp collectors (or should I say philatelists) know this better than anyone: errors are what keep things interesting. Theresa Rebeck is an overt writer, very explicit and crisp in tone and mannerisms, so she explains this within the play itself: damaged people are interesting too. So are interesting hybrids of character types: F. Murray Abraham plays an arms-dealing stamp enthusiast named Sterling, and Alison Pill plays both a scrap and scrapper of a girl as Jackie, who is best described as the flickering exhaust of a lighter: dangerous and fragile all at once. This is important, as Rebeck's plot is fairly obvious and in the familiar con-game tenor of early Mamet: her characters are what sustain the script, her actors are what fill the stage (John Lee Beatty's sets are intentionally bland so as to support the squalor of Jackie's life). I'm glad, then, to have Doug Hughes (Doubt) in command, who eschews spectacle for essence, and as a result often gets it. As for the rest of the cast, Bobby Cannavale understands both the aggression and the silence of a smooth talker, and Katie Finneran (who was a riot in Pig Farm) inverts her deadpan to make one of the most numbingly unconscious villains I've seen on stage. (As for Dylan Baker, both the actor and the character are superfluous: Baker's sleepwalking through a boring role.) Doesn't matter, really: I couldn't keep my eyes off Pill, who has a special tenacity of spirit that is as irresistable here as it was in Blackbird and Lieutenant of Inishmore. She'll grow up to give my favorite actress, Mary Louise Parker, a run for her money, mark my words.


The Ritz

There's nothing momentous about The Ritz; the closest Terrance McNally's script approaches to serious issues is when Gaetano Proclo (Kevin Chamberlin) tells Chris (Brooks Ashmanskas, delightfully spry, and as swishy in his movements as his floral robes), that gays aren't normal. He doesn't say it exactly like that, but his accidental outburst is clear: American "tolerance" is more ignorance than acceptance. However, The Ritz is a farce (one already stripped of the pallor of AIDS), so Gaetano apologizes and befriends Chris. He's just a straight man (literally) in this comedy hiding in a gay Manhattan bathhouse to escape his murderous brother-in-law, Carmine Vespucci (Lenny Venito, a real ham). And what a place: on Scott Pask's three-tiered birthday cake of a set, there's always some sort of icing going on, be it that of the chubby chasing Claude Perkins (Patrick Kerr, who plays the part as creepily as the character's name), or that of the go-go goer, Googie Gomez. (Rosie Perez plays the part well, enthusiastically violent in both her intentionally awful singing and clumsy seductions, but she's just inaudible or unintelligible half the time.) Joe Mantello does a tremendous job of keeping a lot of half-naked men in action (Take Me Out had to have helped), and the only irritating part of the show remains the role of Brick: Terrence Riordan doesn't look intimidating enough for that Mickey Mouse voice to be funny. Luckily, Chamberlin grounds the whole show in a wide-eyed glaze of stupor, terror, and (at times) curious amusement: he's the row of neon bulbs in "The Ritz" that keeps it from being "The Pitz."

PLAY: "Good Heif"

Photo/Jim Baldassare

Good Heif, a new play by Maggie Smith, takes place in a timeless, arid wasteland, where sons, their pa's, their pa's pa's, their pa's pa's pa's, and all all's spend or spent their lives diggin'. They do so without question, entrenched in an unnamed pain that they overcome by becoming inured to it. The pleasure of sex is now the violence of "fuck," a euphemistic "diggin'" that Pa (a gruff and believable John McAdams) suggests the growing Lad (Christopher Ryan Richards) attend to with any ol' heifer. Sex is a fragile dust-thing, like the rest of their limbo existence, and Ma (Barbara Pitts) refuses to even acknowledge it ("ya plant an appley seed and then it grows and so do ye--Everyone knows"). In fact, she won't even touch her family, and Pa and Lad can only watch her darkly comic seizures, yelling at her to get up, a resilience that qualifies Ma as "a good woman." No surprise then that there's no God here, just a Devil that they must pray away.

This reluctant emotion, this closeted heart, makes Good Heif itself into an arid wasteland. Overly stylized and lost in metaphor, the script may beat to the same measured staccato of the diggin', but it isn't bearing any fruit either, and once it outgrows the incipient laughs, it thuds. As farce, such methodical emphasis works (as in Greg Kotis's Pig Farm); it works as an emotional substitute, too (as in New George's last production, Jenny Schwartz's God's Ear). To make overbearing language represent something far subtler, however: that's a real trick. Sarah Cameron Sunde manages to sustain the pace for a while by reducing the acting to stark physical movements. But clockwork scenes, already drilled short by the (James) Ellroy-like language, have a weakness: their gears tend to gum up in intense, shriveling heat of an unflinching poet.

From the two-foot long erection in Lad's pants and the discovery of wet, soft, bubbling holes in the earth, it seems clear that Smith means to deal with sexual maturation versus the stubborn religious mores of previous generations. But Lad is too weak a character to rebel, which leads to another character, the horned Ol' Heif (April Matthis), who represents either a wily devil or a faun-like manifestation of Lad's subconscious need for the female touch. She, crawling across midnight rocks with crevasses gleaming with glowstick light, is playful freedom; he, stiff-backed and waddling like a pencil, wears a corset around his hips and is repressed "normal." But these moments between Lad and Ol' Heif are too dreamlike to give an easy answer, and the play lives up to its own credo: "Work is what livin's for." Good Heif is work, and while it's work filled with life, it ends up simply being work and work alone.

PLAY: "Departures"

For all that Romeo and Juliet is a good love story, for all the ages, there's something a little unsettling about it: the youth, the naivety, and the needless resolute tragedy of the ending. I find myself drawn to the fragility of Kristen Palmer's Departures a little more, a play whose tragedy isn't the finality of death, but the death knoll of long distance: Cara (Keira Keeley) is going home to America in three months, and Andrew (Travis York) will be left behind, to drink his way to an early death in mopey Wakefield, England. These two may speak less poetically than those star-crossed lovers, but there's something more immediate in their contemporarily beautiful words. By staying simple and true, with a fine cast and focused direction, Departures is a quiet marvel on its own; not meant to be compared with Shakespeare, but of fine caliber all the same.

Palmer's effect stems from the contrast between the openhearted emotion of Andrew and restrained concerns of Cara. Andrew's the sort of man who loudly (and at length) broadly declaims words like "sure" (and all other "indeterminate expressions of emotion") and casts all his loving fantasies as miniature epics of long-lost angels and dreams. On the other hand, Cara speaks from the terrible future she can't seem to escape, a place that's she run to trying to escape her equally terrible past, a past that shakes her into a cold sweat every night. But the two are united by their commonalities: they're both writers without outlets, they both seek the momentary respite of alcohol, and they both find great passion, whether it's through tense arguments or tender agreements. For dramatic sake, Palmer doesn't spend much time in the sweet somethings of their "doomed" relationship: the prelude to the play opens at the start of summer, and the remainder takes place three months later, two days before Cara's departure.

Kerry Lee Chipman's set drops the two actors in the pit of what looks like a large half-pipe, as if they've literally fallen for each other, and then uses the opposite lips or outer boundaries of the central bedroom to set the distancing monologues. Director Kyle Ancowitz uses the tight central space to force the actors to really use one another--there's nowhere else for them to go. It also focusing the audience, who sit sits on opposite ends, like spectators at an amateur tennis match peering down at each new volley: Andrew plans to visit Cara by means of an illegal scheme his mates have cooked up; Cara can't stand Andrew being so close, because she can't afford to hurt anyone else; Andrew can't stand his own loneliness. There are no crazy twists, no last minute deus ex machina: the minute intricacies of the human heart are more than adequate.

Such simple work, even with the elevated, far from indeterminate language of the script, is actually hard to perform, as it requires attention to detail, especially with the audience looming so close. York and Keeley are a fantastic match, with fine chemistry both in their intimate moments under the covers and their public spats around the flat and in the hallway. York plays the more expressive character, and he does a fine job of keeping the play lively and on its feet, sweetly charming, and all the more sympathetic because of his wounded confidence. He says he won't get on without her, and there's the sense that he won't; likewise, thanks to Keeley's strong partnering, in Cara's eyes, it's clear that she can't live with the responsibility for Andrew's heart.

The play ends with Andrew driving Cara to the airport, and as Palmer points out earlier in the script, "when you leave, you don't get to find out what happens." But given the delight I had watching these two find sweet succor in one another, full of wistful glances even after their climactic fight, I'd like to hazard a pleasant guess and hope for the best.