The Hired Man

Photo/Tristram Kenton

What happens when an epic story--Melvyn Bragg's The Hired Man, the first part of the Cumbrian Trilogy--gets compressed into a chamber musical? You get a show bursting at the seams with energy, but one that's stuck at the seams all the same. The musical is blessed with Howard Goodall's catchy folk songs (from the frothy melody of "Get Up And Go Lad" and the percussive shoveling of "Work") and individuals like Richard Colvin and Claire Sundin who are more than capable of switching into the operatic rage and sweet sorrow of songs like "What Would You Say To Your Son?" and "Fade Away." However, Bragg's adaptation condenses so much that the scenes become melodramatically weak, and the songs, barely tethered to the text, float through the audience more like a themed revue than a show. And though it's hard to say that matters when the counter-melodies of four different songs explode into a rousing finale, the show is too glibly forced: hell, the song "War" could very well be part of a musical reenactment of the same.

The show opens in 1898, with a glimpse of life before unions: workers like John (Colvin) cluster in hiring fairs, looking for work, but without the power to negotiate much of a living wage. ("Work's the only thing that's cheap these days," says one farmer.) Desperate to support his pregnant wife, Emily (Sundin), John contracts himself to Pennington (Andrew Wheaton), unaware that his wife has a history with Pennington's son, Jackson (Simon Pontin), the roguish antihero. It's not a particularly strong first act: the scenes are melodramatic, not memorable, and many of the songs, light and frilly, bleed into one another.

That's the cost of such compression: Bragg wants to give a wide cross-section of life, and so one of John's brothers, Isaac (Stuart Ward), introduces us to Westmorland-style wrestling, while the other, Seth (David Stothard), sows the seeds of unionizing dissent. We meet the girlish Sally (Katie Howell), only long enough for her to joke about marriage, and Jackson turns his adventurous eyes from his farming father's native land to the foreign adventures of the army, there's no weight to any of his words. And while Act II delivers substance to some of these topics, it does so by simply skipping from event to event, giving up on development altogether.

Ultimately, the show too often feels as reductive as the set's painted backdrop, and Daniel Buckroyd's direction is too stiffly staged as a tableaux. Of course, reducing something so epic still leaves The Hired Man standing tall above a great many of this season's off-Broadway musicals; I just hoped for something a little less businesslike, and a little more soulful.

Hospital 2008 (episode one)

Photo/Dixie Sheridan

The saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," so the fans and fanatics drooling each year over Axis Theater Company's serial drama Hospital are not likely to be disappointed with this year's four surreal, comic installments. But from a critical point of view, it's hard to process what, other than a ridiculously experimental showcase, Axis is after. Watching Hospital 2008 episode one is akin to grabbing 35 minutes from the middle of a David Lynch film: the narratives are loose and disconnected, the actors are disturbingly present (yet blurred), and the ambiance (nicely evoked here by Kyle Chepulis's literal cavern of a set and David Zeffren's selective lighting) is unsettling. The trouble is that this serial version lacks the deepening compulsion of Lynch's craft: nothing within this segment ties in to anything (unless you count cryptic references to "an apartment"), and with such a short run-time, the mood of the piece never pulls the audience under.

In other words, the play is broken synecdoche--that is, the outside world (for the play takes place within a coma victim's mind) is not at all represented (recognizably, at least) by the symbols within it. The end result is something that exists purely as a cult experience, and that's a shame, given the strong performances from cast members like David Crabb (as a research physician with a wide vocal range), Laurie Kilmartin (as a tentative and deranged nurse), and Edgar Oliver (as the Mad Hatter). It's no surprise that the three protagonists, trapped in New York's Water Tunnel #3, are so forgettable: straight men have no place in surreal comedy.

It's hard to criticize Hospital 2008: it's not really a play (let alone a self-contained episode). There's no resolution, and it's hard to explain exactly what the obstacle is, considering that the protagonists are so aimless. Unlike Lost, which at least ekes out answers and delivers on action, Hospital remains resolutely focused on dreams, and while Randy Sharp does an excellent job of staging that undefined world (for example, televisions mounted above the stage show loops of a hospital room and a heart-rate monitor, an effect that is both anachronistic and creepy), in the end, it boils down to a series of cues (lights up, lights down) briefly enlivened by weird antics.

Port Authority

[Reviewed for Show Business Weekly]

Conor McPherson can be a hypnotic playwright. Unfortunately, in this brooding triptych of monologues, his lyrical gift for the rhythms of the soul rarely does more than the hypnotist’s announcement: “You are getting sleepy.” Like The Good Thief, an early one-man show of his, Port Authority is a tinderbox of passivity that never sparks; it is a full description, but of empty lives and absent loves.

The youngest character, Kevin (John Gallagher, Jr.), stands up and, like a spectator of his own life, tells us of his roommates: two reckless, feckless drunks, and Claire —supposedly the love of his life — of whom he speaks dispassionately and actively follows but never actually pursues. The oldest, Joe (Jim Norton), is a similar specter, though at least more daring — between drinks at his nursing home, he thinks fondly of a neighbor whose image was so strong in his mind that he tried to steal her picture. Stuck between is Dermot (Brian D’Arcy James), who speaks in a colorful present tense about perfectly ordinary stuff — like accidentally ogling his new boss’s wife’s tits. Despite being married, he’s never found love; only desire (a desire which, unlike his narration, is tragically in the past). All three are fine performers, and, with Gallagher and Norton, their recent work (Spring Awakening and McPherson’s own The Seafarer) helps to give some perspective on how dull and empty their onstage lives are now.

McPherson is a wonderful naturalist, but sitting three generations of Irishmen on a lonely wooden bench and having them take turns speaking is far from natural. Nor is director Henry Wishcamper willing to pursue a natural approach. Although Jenny Mannis’s plain costumes and Takeshi Kata’s unadorned set clearly ground the play in reality, Wishcamper practically poses his actors between monologues, and Matthew Richards’s lighting design — which cannot go more than a minute without shifting shadows — is like an epileptic fit in super-slow motion.

Port Authority is a play about feelings — particularly longings — that cannot be explained. “I felt like that was the truth,” says Joe. What this means for McPherson’s world is that every word spoken either takes away from those feelings or only seems like the truth.

EST Marathon

More a relay race between playwrights than a marathon, Ensemble Studio Theater's thirtieth year of Marathon one-act plays is still the Olympic standard for festivals of this nature. The range of talent isn't just diverse--it's downright bizarre, finding Pulitzer Prize-winning David Auburn on the same playbill as Michael John Garces, an AD in LA, or to see the off-beat work of Taylor Mac and Anne Washburn on the same night as mass-produced Neil LaBute. But it's bizarre only in the sense of magical abundance; in truth, there's an abundance of talent on display at this bazaar (to be fair, also some coal and rough-cut diamond). Thanks to a mercifully smooth technical production by the EST staff, Maiko Chii's adaptable sets, and Evan Purcell's fluid lighting, Marathon 30 provides audiences with the opportunity to see the highs and lows of the one-act form.

Series A, which closed on May 31, opened not on a high or a low note, but on a note all the same, that of Willie Reale's A Little Soul Searching, a short musical ditty that falls into a trap of condensation. It's somewhat of a frustrating piece, for it operates simply to poke fun at Earth: two A-class brother-and-sister souls, on the verge of reincarnation, think they deserve better--like planet Felicity, where paper towels actually absorb . . . and people don't try to kill one another. The resolution can't help being pedantic, for the show is stifled by its length. Not so, on the other hand, for David Auburn's An Upset, a play that not only comes full circle, but communicates a full story in the process, as the young, easygoing, unranked tennis upstart (Matt Lauria) makes his name beating the old cocky pro (Darren Goldstein) . . . only to find himself in those same shoes just a few years later.

Michael John Garces's Tostitos is also worth noting: it's improved since The Shalimar's You People, with the small space helping to condense the very real, very frightening anger of Red (Andres Munar). But that anger still isn't recognizable; it's pure (Karen Eilbacher) and rediscovered innocence (Jenny Gomez) that gives us something to hold on to. As for Amy Herzog's Christmas Present and Quincy Long's Wedding Pictures: as quirky comic experimentations, they're well-suited for the one-act form (the latter's mime-to-music brings lighter times to mind) but a gimmick's a gimmick, even if that gimmick cracks jokes at STDs.

Series B, which runs until June 20th, has the same peaks and valleys, but a more natural approach that speaks to the times and tones of the playwrights. Unfortunately, Anne Washburn's October/November lacks the buoyancy of her strange comedies, settling too much into a bland and strangely passionless "love" story between a boy (Gio Perez), a girl (Amelia McClain), and a the idea of the freedom of a guitar. The same goes for Lloyd Suh's Happy Birthday William Abernathy, but at least the dryness of its dialogue is balanced by the originality of the concept, in which a racist great-great-grandfather (Joe Ponazecki) has to come to terms with his great-grandson (Peter Kim): "I don't know how my family become so Oriental," he says one minute, "You should've stayed in China where you belonged," the next. Of course, he does so entirely without pants on, which too easily allows us to retreat from the underlying conceit.

Raising the stakes a little higher, but not taking things far enough, is David Zellnick's Ideogram, which connects an interesting concept to an emotional core. The joking tone allows for a clever narrative: Caucasian Jasper (Bryan Fenkart) writes fake Chinese "chicken-scratch" on his Asian friend Drew's (Pun Bandhu) birthday card only to find that he's actually writing beautiful plays. But beneath the in-jokes (Jasper instructs Siho Ellsmore, the actress playing his Chinese translator, to play the stereotype as "Central Casting old"), there's also truth--for Jasper's "gift" turns Drew into a jealous and perhaps even self-hating man. The only problem is that it ends so soon that Zellnick's forced to wrap things up with a tidy koan-like conclusion.

In the same boat is Neil LaBute, whose The Great War will either be the best thing you see in the festival, or one of the worst. For me, it's the worst: it says a lot, very rapidly, but in such shallow dimensions that it need not have been written at all. The other playwrights seem to be striving at something--but LaBute settles for more of the same, and not top-shelf more of the same. The lines are sharp as ever, as Woman (an impressive Laila Robins) tells Man (a somewhat believable Grant Shaud) that she doesn't want the kids: "They're nothing to write home about, even if you're halfway through an e-mail." But what you see is what you get: if it's true that "the truth always burns like a motherfucker" then it's no surprise that both characters in this play turn out to be so cold. Neither one wants the kids: what else is new?

The highlight of the evening, and of the series so far, is Taylor Mac's Okay, which uses the basic elements of farce to explode our perceptions of shallow people. Senior prom, girl's bathroom, and the prom queen's in the center stall, trying desperately not to give birth (and you thought having your period at prom was tough?). As her tragedy plays out (and Susannah Flood should get a medal for remaining so serious), her friends file in--Jordan (Kether Donohue), who yaks on and on about everything (and yet nothing) under the sun, followed by Trish and her silent cohort Trinity (Olivia Mandell and Jessica Jade Andres), who go from snorting coke and spraying their hair to talking about Iraq and the big issues they're most certainly not OK with.

Stephanie hides from her peers by crouching, underwear dangling, on the toilet seat, Trish and Trinity soon follow suit to avoid Josh (Bobby Moreno), who drunkenly proclaims his love before passing out, and confident Mike and nervous Tommy (Johnny Pruitt and Danny Fernandez) who are just looking for a quiet place to have sex (we can see all the actors in the stalls, but these two can't). Taylor Mac's dialogue is sinfully easy, and his monologues are absurdly touching (particularly Mike's rant about the 400-pounder he once "fucked"): his text literally slides across the floor until it's close enough to smack you in the face. All the ditsy comedy disguises the disgusting truths, not just the ones in the center stall, but about what we actually make of the word (or feeling) "okay." Juggling that many balls, especially in a one act, is an impressive feat, not just for the playwright or director (Jose Zayas), but for the cast, too, and that's the sort of envelop-pushing that one-acts should aim for.

Reasons To Be Pretty

Photo/Joan Marcus

It's not hard to put yourself in the shoes of Neil LaBute's latest accidental fuck-up of a character, Greg. Just have a few drinks with your best friend (call him Kent), and then, while talking about the undeniably hot chick who just started working the register, slur something about how, yeah, she's hot, your girlfriend of four years isn't pretty like that. It's a shame that Kent's wife, Carly, is not only in the next room, listening, but that her best friend, Steph, happens to be your girlfriend, but that should at least clue you in on why, as the lights rise, you're stuck in a fight you can't win.

Reasons To Be Pretty takes Greg's words at face value; the question the audience has to determine, as Steph calls him out on what she perceives to be the relationship-ending honesty of his words, is whether or not LaBute is capable of writing the truth. The answer: yes, and no. LaBute writes in a sort of hyper-realism, in which the situations are all too genuine, but the dialogue surrounding them is so crisp that it tends to create artificialities that stifle any genuine emotion: protecting the characters with patter. His prolific writing makes him a lazy playwright: the character in the center is real, but everyone else is just acting on him: they feed him pap, exit the stage, and cease to exist.

Reasons To Be Pretty ends up the same: as Greg, Thomas Sadoski is a marvelously human lead. He weathers Hurricane Steph's questions with a justly confused attitude, he tries to win her back with the best intentions, he puts on a happy face (and lets it crack) trying to deal with her new boyfriend and Kent's infidelities, and tries to do the right thing, even though the books he's read don't tell him what that is. However, Alison Pill's rabid rage against him comes out of nowhere: she does brilliantly to give Greg something to react to, and her acting is cool as ice, but it lacks humanity. (She gets some of it back in the second act, but by then, it seems like she's just putting us on.) The same, more so, for Pablo Schreiber's turn as Kent: he acts as if he knows he's the asshole, and he wallows in that, muddying up any truth or clear intent to his actions. He's still acting (I hope: this seems to be a stereotype for him), but it's all focused on Greg; nothing touches him. Surprisingly, LaBute leaves something in the tank for Carly, and Piper Perabo snaps it up, sharply transitioning from a walking punchline ("That's why they call it night," she says. "Because it's dark.") into the sort of woman who is smart enough to know that she's a little stupid, and brave enough to face those feelings.

Perhaps understanding the limitations of the play, Terry Kinney directs to LaBute's strengths: the production is extremely well-oiled, from the swift scene changes to the rapid-fire dialogue, which pops even when it's firing blanks. The set--a room boxed in by Wal-Mart-like storage--is the only ambiguous thing in the play; everything else is sharp and to the point. And that's perhaps what LaBute most needs to work on: Reasons To Be Pretty suffers from the inclusion of four aimless monologues (one per character) that are meant to illuminate, but only reiterate what's already coming across in the scenes. This is that laziness back to haunt LaBute: if he knew how to write more developed characters, perhaps he'd be able to trust them a little more.