Girls in Trouble

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Hutch (Andy Gershenzon) and Teddy (Brett Aresco), two college cats from the '60s are speeding through the night. Hutch, a spoiled but connected rich kid, is regaling his nerdy friend with tales of his many conquests, and imparts the following advice about getting from first to second base: "Go...as if it were all part of one graceful, completely unexceptional movement so she won't be alarmed, onto her breast. Nothing at all dramatic. You kill it if it's all neon and 'Breast! Breast!'" And that's how Jonathan Reynold's Girls in Trouble starts, waiting a full fifteen minutes before springing Barb (Betsy Lippitt) and her impending abortion from the backseat. Arrogant before, Hutch is now fully callous and on his way to outright villainy, especially as he convinces her to go through with it by all but raping her. He's trouble, all right, and though we sympathize, her inevitable complication is a little too pat--as is the majority of Girls in Trouble. What often starts out graceful almost always turns to "Abortion! Abortion!," for Reynolds is less interested in exploring character than in exploiting circumstances.

To Reynold's credit, he gives both sides a fair run for their money, despite coming from a conservative standpoint. In his world, it's not that abortion is flat-out wrong, so much as it is that the women in this play are getting abortions for what some might call the wrong reasons. (No matter how pro-choice you are, it's hard to say that it's the right choice if you agree that it's murder but don't care.) And these moments, which are rarely seen on stage, are the more surprising and interesting ones. The second act jumps to the 80s, and revolves around a spoken-word monologue from Sunny (Eboni Booth): "I just a po' little ghetto girl nigger born and bred," is how she describes herself, though she transforms as she speaks of her lover, Danny: "Well, lots say that, 'You special,' and I know they after these bubbles, but you, Danny, you say, 'Sunny, you special to me.'" We think we know where things are going when the upward aspiring Danny abandons her (her street-talk embarrasses him), but no. Instead, she brags of alimony ("You gonna pay for not lovin' me"). It's not until Danny re-enters her life, until she sees how much he loves their soon-to-be-child, that she decides to get an abortion: "I'm gonna take this thing you say you love most and show you where the power at now." Booth's performance is both carefully considered and emotionally fraught, and that's what makes the tale so affecting: you love and hate her all at once.

This is what makes the third act so frustrating. Though this modern section starts in the middle of the action, Amanda (Laurel Holland) and Cynthia (Booth) keep interrupting the action to explain it to us. In addition, it makes Reynolds a sloppy writer: because he's got a liberal vegan chef on one side and a conservative guerrilla anti-abortionist, he can say whatever he wants without having to justify it. They're spokespersons for rejoinders like these: "A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." "Yes, and a liberal is a conservative who's had an orgasm." The frustrating part is that Cynthia is a unique character--serenely menacing, even when she strips completely, both to unnerve Amanda and to prove that she's unarmed. Though this Cynthia turns out to be the grown-up version of Sunny (she didn't have that abortion), who was in fact Cindy, the daughter of the abortionist visited by Hutch, Teddy, and Barb, we're missing the crucial (and convincing) bit of how she got from A to B to C. Furthermore, because their motives are clearly spoken to the audience, we're never shaken up, even when things are supposed to get uncomfortable at the end.

Free speech, according to Reynolds, is "the right of every American to scare the shit out of every other American," but he's so free--so loose--that we tune out, especially when one starts to quote Freakonomics and the other tries anthropomorphizing with a pair of ptarmigans. Then again, the show runs so smoothly--especially under Jim Simpson's direction--that it does occasionally catch you off-guard, which is the biggest complement one can give a hot-button show, one for which audiences are likely to already be pretty firmly entrenched. In other words, the more the third act turns into an episode of Jerry Springer ("I'm trying to save your daughter's life!" "I'm trying to save my life!"), the more a basic fact--there are millions of people dying to adopt--comes across as profound. Girls in Trouble may be exploitative, but it's at least interesting.

Prescription Strength Theater

"Can you believe the nerve of this guy?" says Susan, talking (to the employee she has just fired) about her "absurdly long" (read: one hour) wait for the doctor. The good and bad of Prescription Strength Theater, a double-bill of short plays from 3Graces Theater, is that we can believe the nerve. We can laugh about it, too, but Sharyn Rothstein nor Patrick Link are too comfortable to properly take on healthcare: they mock it, but they don't rage about it. However, though the shows are just enjoyably straightforward, they're happily far from being anemic.

So, back to Susan (Chelsea Silverman), the hero-by-default of Rothstein's play, Susan's Medical Blog. Dr. Jim Darvish (Sean Modica) has finally arrived, and he's a tongue-depressor-in-cheek sort of guy: "I'm a doctor, we don't really do sorrow." He's not such a bad guy; he's just riled up by his premiums ("I could've been a valve in the anus guy, they're raking it in now!"). And after dealing with Susan, he's all the more on edge: despite (or perhaps because of) being in charge of a major pharmaceutical company's advertising, she uses the Internet to self-diagnose her symptoms, blogging in that self-centeredly selfless way, about the whole thing. However, what at first appears to be a fed-up doctor's revenge--he makes up a life-threatening ailment for her--is taken so seriously by Rothstein that it becomes fact, with Susan's eager, sex-selling assistant Lucy (Julie Leedes) showing up to help convince her to be a guinea pig. ("It's new, it's very expensive, we're not entirely sure what it does.") The dialogue bounces too-smoothly along, and as satire goes, it lacks bite.

Link's The Benefits of Elsewhere, on the other hand, has the benefit of being a more straightforward drama. It's less witty, but it also comes across as less forced, and though it's filled with the jaded proselytizing of Linda (Suzanne Barbetta), an ex-nurse-turned-ex-health-insurance-claims-adjuster, Link's remains on-topic as he asserts that "Life is not about benefits"--it's about life. Abigail Zealey Bess's staging enforces this from the get-go, with Gwen (Georgia Southern), wedged between the desks of her manager, Bev (Kelli Lynn Harrison), and Linda, who she is replacing. "There's death and taxes," as one puts it, "and between that, there's us," and it works well to show these middle-men, these corporate vultures, roosting in their tiny office. At the same time, Ms. Harrison gives a very fair portrayal of Bev--though she's callously dispensing life and death in those little folders of hers, she's at worst a "9 to 5" villain, and more representative of American culture than we'd like to admit.

This may be Prescription Strength Theater, but what these two placid plays really teach us about theater and health care, it's that more aggressive treatments are called for. Next time, bring on the electric shocks.

The Miracle Worker

Photo/Sara Krulwich

In a cruelly ironic jab to Circle in the Square's theater-in-the-round production of The Miracle Worker, many of the audience members will, at one point or another, be entirely blind to what's happening on stage. Thankfully, William Gibson's script--which has aged surprisingly well--is far from deafening, and is neatly delivered by a talented cast.

The tear-jerking plot, as you've surely seen (or seen parodied) before, is based on the true story of the attempts of twenty-year-old Annie Sullivan (Alison Pill) to teach the blind and deaf Helen Keller (Abigail Breslin) to understand words. Along the way, she must deal with Keller's coddling mother (Jennifer Morrison), strict yet spoiling father (Matthew Modine), as well as with her own youth and inexperience. Of these four main characters, Morrison has the least the work with; that she still finds a way to show a heartfelt resolve beneath those manners is a sign of how well Kate Whoriskey works with her actors. (In other words, anyone would struggle to stage The Miracle Worker in the round: a play built around still, quiet, and tentative moments has few opportunities to cheat out.)

In any case, The Miracle Worker leaves little room for directorial "meddling," and the production is very smoothly and straightforwardly done, so as to leave the emphasis on the story itself. Derek McLane's set slides up as easily from the floor as it glides down from the sky, and Kenneth Posner's lighting neatly focuses the action during Sullivan's nightmares of childhood (even when her back is to the audience). It's all so functional, in fact, that we forget the old-timey bits (the social status of the 1880s) and focus entirely on the bravura performances from Breslin and Pill.

It's no surprise to find Pill entirely capable of playing this strong woman--her rigorous convictions were cemented in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, her determination in Mauritus, and her fiery doubts in Reasons To Be Pretty: she's been engineered to crisply say things like, "You think I'm so easily gotten rid of? I have nothing else to do." Her steeliness is abetted by those killer shades of her (the ones for her own ocular conditions): "The room's a wreck, but her napkin is folded," she says, staring down an increasingly flustered Modine. It's a delight to find her matched by Breslin, who has the near-impossible role of playing a wild child without sinking to cheap melodrama. Though she has no vocabulary, she is filled with an expressive language, a wide range of frustrated emotions. When she fights with Sullivan, unwilling to use a spoon, there is a moment when she realizes how useful the spoon can be--her face lights up--and then quickly hides that, and, rebelliously determined not to give in, she flings it to the ground again. These action-packed moments bring out the best of the cast and the director, even if the nuance is unfortunately always lost on a quarter of the audience.

The real miracle of The Miracle Worker is that, despite being entirely predictable, it is still filled with the desperate hopes that make for engaging drama. Though many of the scenes between Keller and Sullivan are based on the same spelled-out repetitions ("It has a name"), neither actress is at a loss for finding new tactics or deeper motivations. When Sullivan pushes to take Keller away from her family and the crippling nature of pity, Captain Keller rebukes her: "This is hardly a war." But Sullivan (and Whoriskey) know better: "Well, it's not love. A siege is a siege." By keeping such high stakes and refusing to indulge in platitudes, the production remains dramatically sound, even when the staging slips.

Legs and All

When is a box not a box? The moment you decide it's not. Problem is, while it was easy to imagine our way into other worlds as a child, at some point, we outgrew our refrigerator-box spaceships and saw only the utility of a packaging crate. So it's a pleasure to report that Legs and All, a comedic bit of imagineering by Summer Shapiro and Peter Musante, is rooted in the pleasures of the past, and successfully spreads the joy of whimsy throughout the theater, much as the clowns Bill Irwin and David Shiner did way back in 1993's Fool Moon (or, more recently, like Lorenzo Pisioni in his autobiographical Humor Abuse). The result is black-box theater at its finest, for the exquisite physical comedy from this pair refuses to acknowledge their set as a black box--even the actual box they use becomes so much more.

Subtitled "a magical look at the mundane," Legs and All begins with a firm fusing of the two. A recorded voice speaks in a sort of French gibberish language as our clownish heroes pop up and spin around within the confines of a tiny box, summoning up the elasticity of The Triplets of Belleville (particularly in their connection to Brandi Brandes's music). Then, as they freeze, Rico Rosseti's lights cleverly shift from angle to angle, showing off all the different angles and dimensions available to the show. Rules are simultaneously being established and broken, and as the lights dim on the prelude, the audience is filled with an eager anticipation for the "anything" that may follow.

At first, the two are solo performers: Musante attempts to steal a bright orange ball that has been left unattended, drawing more and more attention to his incredibly precise attempts to be subtle, and Shapiro, lurking within the box, seems to be two discrete entities--her ravenous head, which slowly pounces on unsuspecting crackers, and her spidery hands, which keep catching her by surprise. There is a pleasure taken in every moment, every gesture, and the two are expertly trained enough to sincerely broadcast their intents in the slightest of facial twitches, so much so that when a cracker falls on the floor, Shapiro's eyes flicker from sadness to anger to resolve all in a few seconds, and all without a scrap of dialogue. Surprising, too: Shaprio cannot simply reach down to grab the cracker--having established that these are to be picked up with her mouth, she winds up in a hand-stand atop the box, slowly lowering herself face-first toward the food.

These moments are enrapturing; if they're later exposed as bagatelles, it is only on account of how much higher the two elevate their craft in the ensuing scenes, in which Musante--attracted to the fey Shaprio--is sucked through the box and into her world. Now dimensions really do shift: first, just the box (which is now, upside-down, a table), then the actors themselves, contorting their bodies so as to make the side of the box appear to be the top of it. It's here, too, that the mundane becomes magical: napkins dirty one's face instead of cleaning it, and objects stick in mid-air.

All of this leads to the climactic final act, in which Shapiro follows Musante back out of the box and into the "real" world--tentatively, at first, afraid to step on the ground, then exuberantly, with the two whooping in increasingly higher pitches about how everything's OK. There's the downbeat, as shyness and insecurity sets in, but also the happy ending, with the two reminding us that everything is simply a matter of perspective, imagination, and the combination of the two: perspicacity. Legs and All is the sort of show that leads one to gush, a relentlessly charming, overwhelmingly beautiful piece of art.

metaDRAMA: That Which Shall Not Be Named

Okay, I lied. The name of the worst play that I have ever seen, currently running at the Frigid Festival, is Uncorseted. Masochists, get your tickets now.

There's nothing constructive I can say about the show; I mention it by name to make a larger point: the theater community has a responsibility to ensure that work like this is not supported. Something this doddery and self-indulgent is likely to convince audience members not only to avoid future work by DC's Shark Tank Players, but to avoid the other offerings from the Frigid Festival, and by association, Horse Trade. And that would be a mistake, because Frigid's mounted great shows (like this year's Legs and All, or, two years ago, the Great Hymn of Thanksgiving), and Horse Trade's been a great home for consistent work like The Pumpkin Pie Show.

When I started covering the downtown scene four years ago (mainly because there was so little coverage of it), the big question was "Why don't audiences come out?" That question is still being asked, and the answer still boils down to the same thing: publicity. Either they don't know about it (and with young, unestablished companies and playwrights, how could they?), or they do know about it (read: there is such a thing as bad press). So far as the former goes, that's what I hope to do here: covering the shows that you may not have heard of. But so far as the latter goes, that's on the  community.

And I get it. I've been there--you want to work with people in the future, or you're friends with them, so you come to their show, and you say good things about it. But there's a price for that dishonesty: audiences who have their respect for theater eroded because it's not "real" enough. Or audiences who attended a show because of misleading marketing, and are chary about genuine offers in the future. It's the worst sort of Pyrrhic victory, because the company that "wins" by knowingly putting up a poor show is burning a lot of bridges for other struggling companies. Note: I'm not saying that you can't put up a sub-par show, but you should be honest about it--perhaps don't hire a publicist, and invite only the friends who will love you anyway. Or target audiences who enjoy seeing bad work: they are out there. I'm also not saying that every show needs to be a masterpiece (we often learn by trying and failing): I'm saying that there needs to be a bottom line.

Anyway, I don't mean to go on and on--I'd just like to see better curated festivals and some higher standards among those I generally trust. Because I honestly have no idea how such an ill-prepared company, one that genuinely seemed uncomfortable even to be on stage, manages to mount a show at all, if not for the good-will and support of their friends.