Fight Girl Battle World

Photo/Jim Baldassare

If you open your play with a series of outtakes between an action-figure Boba Fett and his tonton buddy, you've either got huge balls or you know exactly who your audience is. Vampire Cowboys Theater, the undisputed king of the action parody genre, has huge balls and they know their audience, returning to the same ground they covered in last year's Men of Steel, only this time, with a science-fiction spin: Fight Girl Battle World. They've got the vocabulary ("kilofraks," "durk," and "qward," for starters) and the hot guns and hotter girls to prove it. They've got a soundtrack that would make Quentin Tarantino proud: chase scenes set, tongue-in-cheek, to the Bob Dylan's "Handy Dandy," infiltration scenes accompanied by Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic," a hyperspace riff on 2Pac's "California Love," not to mention a climactic fight set to Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life." Beneath it all, Qui Nguyen's even got a passively subversive riff on the creation myth, as the last woman alive, E-V (Melissa Paladino), is sent on a quest by General Dan'h (Temar Underwood) to "bump uglies" with the last man alive, Adon-Ra (Noshir Dalal), a quest that pits them against the villainous President Ya-Wi (Jon Hoche).

Not that you'll have to read into anything in Fight Girl Battle World: the bad guys have sinister laughs (Elena Chang's Mikah Monoch), horrible accents (Andrea Marie Smith's Commander G'Bril), and ridiculous facial hair (Kelley Rae O'Donnell's Zookeeper); meanwhile, the good guys are filled with sarcastic quips (Paco Tolson's LC-4, a k a, the most endearingly arrogant robot since Marvin the Paranoid Android) and roughish charm (Maureen Sebastian's J'an Jah, not just a pilot, but the male of her species). Exposition is straight-up laughed at (after breaking in to kill the president, Adon-Ra explains: "I could go into the long explanation, but it'd be merely expository"), and Robert Ross Parker's direction seamlessly jumps from scene to scene, with actors suddenly dropping out of sight as others pop up into view, like a revolving reel on an old toy viewfinder.

You won't have to think about much, either: the dialog is filled with geeked-out in-jokes for both sci-fi and theater buffs ("Z-Class starfighters" and the diss "Wanna phone home?" go right up there with a play LC-4 wrote called "Death of a Space-Man"), and whether you get them or not, you'll laugh just from the pure energy and charm of the whole cast. Even the slowest bits of the play -- like a reminder from some sort of Smokey the Ursa Minor that "only you can prevent humanity" -- have a purpose, like letting you (and the actors) catch their breath right before another fight scene.

Oh, yes. There are fight scenes. Qui Nguyen doubles as the choreographer, and he take the opportunity to try out a lot of techniques I've never seen before. In an early clip of a "grainy video", the shifting positions of a flashlight behind a scrim cast amplified silhouettes that jitter against the screen, playing with depth perception and height. In another, Nguyen uses body doubles to allow him to play with perspective, a cinematic move that helps him nail the instant replay. And, c'mon: the dude also turns a puppet spacefight into a martial arts showdown: "What in the qward was that?" asks Dan'h, as three actors fly hand-guided ships at one another. "I think they just bit us." Granted, there have been smoother fight scenes on stage before (like in The Jaded Assassin), but they've never been so funny. (And kudos to the actors without professional training: that makes their physical control even more impressive.)

Given the current trend of film adaptations (Spider-Man, Batman, and The Addams Family musicals), it's only a matter of time before Broadway taps someone for Star Wars: The Musical. Hopefully they'll ask Qui Nguyen and Robert Ross Parker for some advice, because they've done a really durking good job.

Hello Failure

Oh, the horrors of being a submariner's wife. If we take Kristen Kosmas's word for it, every moment becomes excruciatingly poetic. If you're Rebecca (Kosmas), you feel submerged in a too-large home, until one day you can't ("I can't. Not today. Not today I don't think I can. Maybe never again.") bring yourself to get out of the bathtub. Or if you're Karen (Aimee Phelan-Deconinck), you feel trapped in the confines of a meaningless life, which you'd be fine with, if only the people at the soup firm could remember your name. And then there are the other four wives: Kate (Joan Jubett), whose self-obsession keeps her as closed off as submarine steel from the ocean; Gina (Tricia Rodley), who channels her frustrations into rage; Netta (Maria Striar), who tries to manage her own crises by carefully controlling everything around her; and Valeska (Janna Gjesdal), who has to maintain her own hippie-like perspective, lest the optimism chip away far enough for others to see her pain. Not to mention the New Girl, Margerie (Megan Hart), who -- in fear of her own fragility -- makes herself out to be incredibly strong in person. Perhaps you recognize something of yourself in them -- Hello, Failure, you might say -- or simply understand what might drive Karen to try learning Japanese, Kate to have an affair with her hairdresser, Netta to create another person out of her own happier past, or Rebecca to write letters to the long-dead, Civil War submarine innovator, Horace Hunley (Matthew Maher), in whom she feels she can safely confide -- even when he shows up in her bathroom.

All this is rich, excellent, substantive stuff. However, the way in which Kosmas has chosen to present it -- in overlapping scenes, fragments of introductory text, or gasps of self-confession that abruptly surface (and just as quickly submerge) -- is often hard to handle. These seams of isolation fit the characters more than they fit the framework of the play, and this self-inflicted style seems to be, like the characters, compensating for an absence of purpose. Ken Rus Schmoll navigates through those choppy waters with real purpose (and I suspect his work with Clubbed Thumb has well-prepared him for such deliberately damaged narratives), and as a result, there are pockets of scene work that hit like bursts of fresh air.

In one, Margerie leads the group in a meditative exercise: "You will never have a normal life," she says. "And that is OK . . . you will love your abnormal life the way an abnormal tiger mother loves its abnormal tiger baby. You can be at parties with other tigers who are normal tigers and you won't even bat an eye, it won't matter to you one bit because you are abnormal, and that is the way it was meant to be and that is the way it is and that is the way it will always be." What works here, and in the play, is that no excuse is made for the way these people are, and no easy solutions are offered: it's not so much learning to swim rather than to sink, it's learning how to breathe underwater once you've already sunk.

At another point, Karen, who often speaks in an aloof and distracted manner, tries to explain her recent enrollment in Japanese classes: "Because I. Because of my mind. Because I want to learn new ways of using my mind. Because I'm tired of all the old familiar ways that my mind wants to use itself. Because I want to make new pathways. Forge new paths. Like a barbarian almost, chopping away at the wilderness. I want to chop away at the wilderness of my mind. Like someone with a machete. . . ." She is having an affair with language in the same way that Kate is having an affair with Shlomy (Michael Chick), a gay hairdresser -- it's just another point of contact, a different approach.

I suspect that my resistance to the play is that it's too aware of itself, of its own structure: it's meta-realism, in which clever characters (and cleverer actors) speak well of the pain, but substitute the discussion of trauma for the actual experience of it, and leave with only the most artificial catharsis, having really dealt with nothing. These seven absent husbands are parts of the problem, but their stories are untold, and there's no way to make the expression of absence in a play ever feel complete. Kosmas compensates for this by injecting two men into the play: failing with Shlomy, a spineless character who comes across as a physical prop for Karen (and later, an improbable option for Karen), but succeeding with Horace, a quiet but commanding foil for everything Rebecca's struggling against (Mr. Maher, who has a distinct lisp, has the ability to making passivity seem either sweet or sinister, depending on the volume of his voice).

Ultimately, Kosmas has to turn to the present audience, turning her actors into a Greek chorus of tragically flawed (but suddenly -- unfortunately -- homogeneous) people who apologize for their inability to look within. It is, as they and Kosmas say, easier to look out, rather than look in. "Who wouldn't? Because sure / if you can think about all that out there / and there's plenty of it out there to think about / I say if you can think about all that then / why think about all this instead? / If you can think about all that then / you don't have to think about what is." But is that the sort of play -- the sort of ending -- that can actually challenge us to do something more? Hello Failure is most important when it's confronting what is; unfortunately, it's at its best when it's confronting what isn't.

Year One of the Empire

Photo/John Brock

The problem with Year One of the Empire, aside from the fact that it's three acts long, is that it bloodlessly tackles a large American injustice. Elinor Fuchs and Joyce Antler have assembled hundreds of texts for this "play of American politics, war, and protest taken from the historical record," but one begs for some measure of Chuck Mee-like elaboration to this collage, for without some boundary pushing flair, the show flatlines through the paces. At its best, the show is history up on its feet, but those unwilling to read a New Yorker essay about the water cure are unlikely to sit through three hours of back-of-your-seat drama; at its worst, the show features actors who would make your seventh-grade history teacher look good. Due to illness, a stand-in went on for Lee Dobson: understandably, he read lines off a clipboard. (I'm can't say why John Tobias was using a script, only that it looked very unprofessional.) It says a lot about the passivity of the play that these recitations sounded no different from anything else.

Then again, the play was written in 1973 by a critic (Fuchs) and a historian (Antler), so I'll cut them -- and the Metropolitan Playhouse, which is dedicated to producing seasons of classic American dramas (this season's very apt theme is "Virtue") -- some slack. We have a rich theatrical heritage; this play, which makes its New York premiere here, is not a part of that. Fuchs writes that they intended the play to be more "texture" than "interpretation," but while it refuses to take sides, all those sides are pretty much the same, and the play is generally nothing more than a series of recited talking points, monologues clustered, in chronological order, toward the noble end of education.

Alex Roe, both artistic and regular director for this production, does at least keep things bustling: the actors may end up quite sedentary as they speak, but the transitions between scenes and characters keep the stage busy with that American sense of industry, and there's a bit of justice in that the cramped theater forces actors to duck under an overhang in order to climb onto a large scaffolded platform. (It's a reminder that beneath all the rhetoric of men like William McKinley or Theodore Roosevelt, there's simple humanity, first and foremost.)

And there are some very nice performances from actors like J.M. McDonough (as the southern anti-imperialist senator, Benjamin Tillman, or as the upright, but ultimately compromised, Andrew Carnegie), Gregory Jones (as an oily, machinating imperialist, Senator Lodge). In fact, most of the actors have one role that they play very well, like Michael Hardart's T.R., or Michael Durkin's Irish bystander, Mr. Dooley. But the play has upward of fifty characters, and the actors do little to make them distinct, a problem that makes many of the lines seem like mere echoes, when they should be resounding calls to action.

But Year One of the Empire doesn't even succeed in teaching us about America in 1898, and any parallels drawn between our actions in the Philippines then and Iraq now, come right out of our oversaturated imaginations. Whether it's the documentary style, the monotonous presentation, or the lack of dramatic obstacles (the closest the play comes to drama are the political meetings in the Senate), much of the information that dribbles in, dribbles right out. The third act calls for a radical shift from highly personal courtroom testimonials from soldiers confessing to acts of cruelty against the Philippine citizens into a recitation of court-martials that should show the impersonality of the American system, and how easily a government can ignore such abuses of power. But even these deliberately direct sections about reconcentration camps, clear uses of torture, and orders of casual execution, come across as regular text, and by failing to capture this crucial humanity, the play simply goes on talking itself to death.

Beebo Brinker Chronicles

Photo/Dixie Sheridan

"Oh, Laura . . . -- darling -- I just can't do it," cries Beth, turning away from her lover. "I just can't can't. Oh Laura!" Beebo, currently serving as the narrator, looks at the two, Beth and Laura, and calmly continues with the story: "The whistle blew. Laura got up from her bench and walked swiftly toward the exit. Beth ran after her." The two girls share a brief, none too melodramatic look (think of Noel Coward's Still Life if you want the mood set right), and then: "Oh, Laura, Laura, please don't leave like this. Please." I know what you're thinking: it sounds hokey. And you're right, for The Beebo Brinker Chronicles is a stage adaptation by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman that aims to preserve the late 50s flair and fleshy pulp of Ann Bannon's series of lesbian fiction. But that's not a bad thing, for they've taken the clipped rhythm and one-line zingers ("We can't think straight because we always think gay"), and rooted them in a real struggle for happiness. If only the play didn't struggle so much to get its point across.

Beth (Autumn Dornfeld) lies impassively in bed with her husband, Charlie (Bill Dawes), unable to understand why she's no longer into him, and why they fight so much. "Does love have to be immoral or illegal before you can enjoy it?" he asks, and he's right on the money, for Beth has married Charlie out of societal fear, and now lives vicariously in her pulp novels, dreaming of how her life might have gone. And though her scenes are littered with exposition ("It's the 60s, not the 40s" or "We have two happy children" are my favorites), they're also harsh: "I'm not gay because I enjoy it," Beth finally confesses, shortly before traveling to New York to seek out the life she turned her back on nine years earlier.

Meanwhile, Laura (Marin Ireland) finds herself on a double date between her and a new friend, Jack (David Greenspan) and her roommate, Marcie (Carolyn Baeumler), and Marcie's ex, Burr (Dawes) that ends -- for novelty's sake -- at a gay bar in the heart of Greenwich Village. There, under the unabashed glare of Beebo (Jenn Colella), Laura starts to feel the emotions she's been repressing, emotions that Jack -- who turns out to be gay -- wants to help her express: there's no shame, he says, in being animals. (Greenspan is a riot throughout, especially armed with advisory lines like "What, do you think she'll quote a couple of lines of Sappho and she'll be ready to go pearl diving?")

The difference between the two women is striking: whereas Beth comes across as a cold fish who inexplicably hates her life, Laura is a fish out of water who -- although trembly and fragile -- plunges in, swims upstream, and finds herself. The difference between actors is remarkable too: Dornfield, as Beth, hurts her own performance by overplaying the role, and even takes the fish metaphor literally, with a constantly quivering lip that makes her insecurity into a physically repeating joke that needs to be serious, whereas Ireland, refining the high-strung energy that she's brought to roles in Manuscript or Bad Jazz, manages to grow from a comically embarrassed girl into a confident woman.

Such differences in performances wouldn't be such an issue if the show were better about distracting us from them. But this is Leigh Silverman's sparest direction -- the entire set always looks like The Cellar (the gay bar that's the hub of the play) and the lights are static and unappealing -- which means the emphasis is on the actors. (At least Theresa Squire's fantastic costumes -- especially an out-of-place riding coat for obstinate Beebo -- always make them look good.) Most of the time, Beebo Brinker Chronicles is sharp enough to thrill the audience, but that deeper surface rarely comes to light, as it does, for instance, when Beth's pulp-inspired fantasy is pitted against Laura's reality, with Beth excitedly reading a torrid scene aloud as Laura and Beebo turn the text to flesh.

That idea -- text as flesh -- is what's so sorely missing from the show. The swagger is there, the feel of the period is there, but the actual substance often gets caught up in the style. Nowhere is it more apparent than with the miscasting of Jenn Colella as Beebo: Colella does a great job acting, but she's always struggling with the fact that she in no way, shape, or form resembles a husky butch and her overcompensation takes away from the depth of Beebo's character. She grows violent, drunk, and possessive, but only the words take on menace: the flesh is dull. On the other hand, she's often paired up with Mrs. Ireland, who is able to amplify her own frailty so plausibly that Beebo seems tough (by comparison).

When the play is on, it's spot on -- something the comic timing of Carolyn "I'll be in the kitchen getting some chips!" Baeumler and the dry wit of David Greenspan nail down. And for all the struggling, Beebo Brinker Chronicles comes out largely ahead: funny, yes, but with well-crafted moments of sadness beneath that perpetual smirk or unflagging quiver. As an ode to pulp novels, the play succeeds; but as a narrative of sexual awakening, it's a little sleepy.

Passing Strange

Photo/Carol Rosegg

There's a lot of talk about "passing" in the excellent new Broadway musical, Passing Strange: our hero, a Youth, passes himself off as a choir boy, punk rocker, European rebel, troubled urban youth, and German artiste, as he struggles to find his identity, his song. But most fortunate of all is that Passing Strange has managed to pass itself off as a Broadway musical, when it's more of a rock-and-roller-coaster ride -- philosophy set to a beat -- that defies every standard it can get a hold of. And that's a good thing.

Stew, the narrator/writer (and Youth, all grown up), opens the show without a mic, then calmly announces: "We're gonna play some music." Later on, he'll cut from the action to announce the intermission, or to relay a story about a particularly deep pretzel vendor. There's no set, just a shimmering curtain, and behind it, a light wall (a cross between the minimalist neon of Spring Awakening and the pointillistic chromolume of Sunday in the Park with George). There's dancing, but it hardly seems choreographed so much as agitated: a physical necessity brought about by the intensity of the song. And even when the show falls into classical stage tropes, as in "The Black One," it's tongue-in-cheek on the level of, say, Urinetown. And the songs, they pass, too, as anything they want, be it a punk-rock send up on "Sole Brother," a psychedelic soft-rock hit for "Must've Been High," jagged avant-garde screeching on "Surface," not to mention drips of industrial, funk, soul, gospel, or simply songs that can do it all at once, as with the theater-shaking power of "Keys." While our hero can't hear the difference between the sacred and the profane, we can: and these songs are all the former, colored with splashes of the latter.

In the six months or so that this play has spent transferring from an Off-Broadway run at The Public (where it was plagued by poor acoustics and a three-fourths-in-the-round staging), Passing Strange has grown into an ever better show. Portions of the first act have been rearranged and the jokes seem punchier; more so, Daniel Breaker, who plays the Youth, seems to have a lot more to do. Those who remember him from Well know that he's good at physical comedy, and although the stage at the Belasco is bigger than at the Public, Annie Dorsen has made Breaker's presence more visible, while still allowing him to grow, scene by scene. And Eisa Davis, who returns as his mother, is even better at switching between a cheerful Today-like dialect and what Stew calls "the Negro dialect." As for the rest of the original cast -- Colman Domingo, de'Adre Aziza, Rebecca Naomi Jones, and Chad Goodridge -- they're still excellent in their tripartite roles, splitting between disaffected youths in Los Angeles, friendly pot-smokers in Amsterdam, and revolutionaries in Berlin. Domingo's still the scene-stealer, spry and serious as the Reverend's repressed son, Franklin (he wishes he were a slave, for they had options, whereas he, as a coward, has only consequences), and cagey and crazed as Mr. Venus, a cross between Riff-Raff and the Emcee.

Unfortunately, there are still problems with Passing Strange. While the first act is much slicker, and bounces strongly from the comic to the serious, the second act, for some reason, seems to have lost the emotional resonance it had off-Broadway. It's not an intimacy issue -- if anything, Dorsen's direction has tightened the focus of the actors who interact around and with Stew, not to mention their easy and often entertaining rapport with the musicians (Heidi Rodewald, who co-created the show; Jon Spurney, Christian Cassan, and Christian Gibbs). And it's not like Mr. Breaker lacks credibility -- his Youth's arrogance has softened and cooled through regret, shame, and sorrow by the time he delivers the climax's eulogy. But something seems rushed through, almost as if the play ends after the emotional duet between Narrator and Youth on "Work the Wound" (though it continues for another two songs).

But don't let that indefinite quibble stop you from seeing Passing Strange. More accessible than ever, yet still just as provocative, it passes with flying colors (literally, if you count the light wall). And ultimately, as Stew promises, the music overpowers everything else, a roar of sound that bills itself as a religious experience, that really Real that can, ultimately, only be found in Art.