Le Cirque Feerique

Photo/Cristina Ramirez 

Though Company XIV is too pure to stoop to such a base pun, their aesthetic choices can be summed up neatly as: "If it ain't Baroque, don't fix it." Following that unspoken credo has helped their latest work, Le Cirque Ferrique (The Fairy Circus) to be every bit as enchanting as their last, Snow White--but it has also kept them from the heights they once captured in their more sultry shows (like Le Serpent Rouge!). Their old adult works were taut--nay, supple--and their newer stuff, which skews toward kids, tends to be looser and more labored. Company XIV was built around Austin McCormick's choreographic delights, and while his strong ensemble is filled with familiar faces, the focus shifts too often to the text (never the strong point of their shows) and its clownish narrator (Jeff Takacs).

And yet, these are small disappointments that more often than not get lost in the sweeping spectacles of Company XIV's gilded fantasy world. And there are plenty of things that work better in Le Cirque Ferrique, like McCormick's use of the Baroque Opera Trio Charities (Brooke Bryant, Amber Youell, and Brett Umlauf): this time, instead of an awkwardly interjecting chorus, they're now properly mashed-up into the proceedings, delivering haunting riffs on Lady Gaga and Madonna. The shift from a single fairy tale to a series of seven short riffs also provides McCormick a wider canvas of dance styles to pull from: "The Princess and the Pea" is told with Arabian flair, all silk swoops and finger-bells; "Ferdinand the Bull" shows its Spanish roots in its leggy stomps; and both "The Frog Prince" and "The Ugly Duckling" create new styles of dance to show its two-man frog, or blind-legs duck. There are plenty of highlights in these eighty-five minutes, particularly the wolf's lascivious duet during "Little Red Riding Hood." The only piece that strains to do something unique is "The King's New Clothes," but then again--that's no surprise: Baroque is far from Burlesque.

McCormick knows how to mix-and-match looks, dances, and music, and seeing just how they'll all fit together is part of the fun of any Company XIV show. For instance, "Cinderella" mixes the text of Roald Dahl's clever, rhyming adaptation with step-sisters in pig- and cow-faced masks; Charities sings "Like a Prayer" as the Fairy Godmother's balloon-brimmed dress descends from the sky. Zane Pihlstrom's frilly costumes--especially the more abstract string-pipe bull mask, or the bedazzled wolf--are otherworldly delights that accent the technical dance moves on display. And of course, the ensemble is a game bunch, from McCormick's tongue-wagging frog to Davon Rainey's powerful yet playful bull, to the gamut of princesses (Laura Careless, Yeva Glover, Marisol Cabrera), not to mention Gioia Marcheses, who for once doesn't only play the villain.

The best storytellers--Dahl, Seuss, Grimm--invent their own stylized worlds and invite others in to take a peek. McCormick may choose to write in corsets, lace, and ballet, but he's every bit as captivating at spinning a tale--or simply at spinning, and spinning, and spinning.

Jacob's House

Photo/Justin Hoch

On the one hand, Jacob’s House is obviously a retelling of the Biblical pseudo-hero Jacob, a play meant to show us the angels—and demons—we must wrestle with in order to live and love in the world today. On the other, it is also a neat parallel for playwright August Schulenburg’s struggle to write the play in the first place. Just as Jacob wrestles with an angel, so too does Schulenburg, his back to the wall after being denied (at the last minute) the rights to Archibald MacLeish’s 1950 adaptation of the story of Job. Just as Jacob earns himself a limp and a blessing, so too does Schulenburg, producing—out of a feverish weekend of writing—a somewhat crippled but brand-new play for Flux Theatre Ensemble (his company).

It’s no surprise that the framing device for Jacob’s House focuses on Jacob’s three heirs, Dinah (Jane Lincoln Taylor), Joe (Zack Calhoon), and Tamar (Jessica Angleskahn) arguing over who gets the inheritance, and whether or not it is a blessing or a curse: these are surely the same things Schulenburg wrestled with. But sadly, whereas Jacob was blessed with time, which enabled him to fail and rebuild from scratch three times, Schulenburg has been forced to rush this play into production, and its unedited strains are evident. Too much of the play is handed over to sloppily written characters like Tamar (no offense to Angleskahn), who are nothing more than provocateurs with mouths big enough for a too-clever writer to dump his excesses out of. “Non-ninja, would that be a nonja?” she asks. Later, she coins the term “ungel” for a non-angel, and despite being treated as a low-bred country girl who calls everyone “Sug,” also says things like “She spoke with the pompatus of love.”

Even when decently acted—like Isaiah Tanenbaum’s comic appearances as the sinisterly leprechaun-like “Messenger”—it’s impossible to salvage lines like “all preggers with twins and what not.” The end result is meant to be Bible Studies for Williamsburg Hipsters, and sometimes it is, as with the description of Jacob’s relationship with Laban’s daughters Leah and Rachel: “Two sisters.” “And they were both in love with him. “Kinky.” But between the staccato pacing of scenes, the uneven tone of the dialogue, and the rambling storytelling—particularly a lengthy riff from Laban—Schulenburg winds up pinned by his own creation. The story he’s updating was meant to deliver simple moral messages, and that’s lost here.

What works, and works well, is the trickster folklore that Schulenburg has appropriated, especially the way he has transformed Jacob into the ultimate con artist. The finest scenes in the play focus around tricks—like the stealing of the birthright—and these are always entertaining bits, bits that also say a lot about Modern America and the pride we take in unethical loopholes. Matthew Archambault does a fine job in the role, too, growing from the scared but prideful boy who tricks Essau (Anthony Wills Jr.) into trading his gun for some “poisoned” potato stew to the confident cow-breeder who announces to Rachel (Kelli Dawn Holsopple) that he’s going to marry her and, of course, to the swaggering man who knowingly gets hitched to Leah (Tiffany Clementi) as well. It’s no surprise that the majority of these scenes are set in the past, where they can avoid getting hung up on the exaggeratedly showy storytelling device.

Schulenburg is no stranger to having a direct narrator, as in his last piece The Lesser Seductions of History. But there, he spoke to a more personal era of change, and he had more immediate ideas to throw around—and, modeled after Our Town, a stronger theatrical basis than that of the Bible, which is (almost by definition) preachy. Only the rare moments at which Dinah, Joe, and Tamar actually get involved in their scenes—recreating an earlier, formative, intimate moment—do these characters justify their weight. These small moments also play into the talented Kelly O’Donnell’s strengths as a visual director: when past and present collide, she can neatly juxtapose the two. When they remain awkwardly separated, there is little she can do other than to store them silently in a corner of Jason Paradine’s neatly cluttered attic set, along with all the other bric-a-brac.

Through it all, the play parallels the author's struggle: in the most effectively tragic scene, Jacob sacrifices more and more of himself--legs, arms, eyes, brain--in an effort to buy the time he needs to wrap things up, to finish. Schulenburg has admirably sacrificed much to mount this play--and it's certainly better than nothing, especially for the actors who are given a chance to showcase their skills. But both he and Jacob do eventually run out of time, and so Jacob's House is left incomplete, rushing to a hasty end and a deus ex angelica, leaving threads unjustified and other threads untied. Hopefully, with more time, more editing, the cursed parts of this play will flower into lovely blessings.

Book Look: Yann Martel's "Beatrice and Virgil"

Beatrice and Virgil is Yann Martel channeling Paul Auster as he calmly relates the story of a one-hit author--a stand-in for himself--who is stuck trying to write about the Holocaust in "a new way" until he encounters a taxidermist who has written a very Beckett-like play. The rest of the short novel--which at times resembles Michael Chabon's circuitous The Final Solution--revolves around excerpts of that play, and the author's attempts to define it. The sections on taxidermy-as-history are richly written, and the play itself--which follows Beatrice, a stubborn donkey, and Virgil, a howler monkey--is an excellent means of abstracting-to-the-point-of-clarity the enormous struggle to talk about something that cannot be talked about. Martel is aware that Beatrice and Virgil's clever, minimalist devices for naming the Horrors is not enough, lacking plot and action, but he does himself a disservice by succumbing to the most lackluster resolution possible, one that distracts from the otherwise elegiac emptinesses of the novel. However, he redeems himself with the tragic, conclusive short story, "Games for Gustav," and with his "sewing kit," a list of coping mechanisms that are far more than the sum of the whole.

See also: Brian K. Vaughn's Pride of Baghdad. 

Letters to the End of the World

Photo/Matthew Murphy

"Africa?" asks Bryan (Peter O'Connor), doing his best to convince his boyfriend Todd (Charles Socarides) to sleep with him. "I don't want to talk about something I don't know anything about, that's how people end up making up shit." Bryan may be poor compared to the rich, well-intentioned Todd, but at least he's honest, which is something that--for most of Letters to the End of the World--writer/director Anton Dudley is not. Though the language is fine, as one might expect from the letter-writing correspondence between Todd and his African-reporting idol Agnatha (Shannon Burkett), the play itself rarely reaches beyond the dimly descriptive, especially for the sections mired in America. Then again, what did we really expect? Agnatha writes for Vogue, and Dudley is making up--or at least falsely appropriating--shit.

Lost as the overall story may be, Dudley at least deserves credit for fleshing out his African characters, though much of that is due to actors Francesca Choy-Kee and Tyrone Mitchell Henderson. (Look at the way Henderson nails even his few lines doubling as a conscience-provoking homeless man.) Ms. Mwando starts out as a sour matriarch, clucking at the juvenile joys of Emmanuel. But it's as much a delight to see the joy peek through Choy-Kee's lips as it is a sorrow to see illness threaten to eclipse those sparks. And Henderson's buoyant energy paves the way for the pending gravity, a performance that fits perfectly with Dudley's own intent (after all, this Nike-loving man has the most serious job of all: coffin-maker). It's a shame that Burkett's portrayal of Agnatha comes across as that of a stubborn, stupid interloper (in other words, an American). It makes her too similar to Socarides's Todd, and neither one ever seems affected by the world around them, even when they've literally got the blood of babies on their hands.

Sadly, Dudley's more concerned with America than Africa, and--as if realizing that he needs to find a way to connect the two--settles on the cheapest solution he can find: AIDS. He also picks the most contrived means of doing so; while Todd is off in Africa, Bryan wallows in a drunken stupor back in America. He also starts sleeping with Tess (Burkett), absurd not just because he is gay, but because Tess happens to be Agnatha's crazy twin sister. (No, really.) If this is the way for him to show Todd his love, then romance is officially dead. So is the potential for poetry in the play: the text is sapped, strangled, and then beaten (like a dead horse), especially as scenes start to repeat themselves. (And repeat they must: since Dudley has little to say, but takes two acts to do so.)

The admirable low-budget aesthetic of At Hand Theatre Company runs into trouble, too: Eli Kaplan-Wildmann's "set" consists of a sliding bench and a crude map drawn on the wall, making it hard for the audience to connect with the things being described. (Were they described more spiritedly, as in I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given To Me By a Young Lady from Rwanda, that would be fine; here, though, they need a striking visual, like that of Roundabout's production of The Overwhelming.) It's a bold choice to stage a show in the round within the small Studio Theater at Theater Row: had there been any action on stage, it would indict us as passive observers. However, for a play about such passive observers, we wind up watching the audience as much as the actors.

At what is supposed to be the "climax" of Letters to the End of the World, Agnatha tells Todd that she is leaving--giving up on the actual people of the clinic--to pursue a story. "I do that and the better version of me--the richer, more educated, more capable version of me--will come here and take my place." That seems to be what Dudley is doing as a playwright, too: he's settling for what he's done and hastily putting it out there, for better or worse, hoping that someone will see this and be inspired enough to do better. Well, at least we can still hope.

Stuffed and Unstrung

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Henson Alternative may want to bill Stuffed and Unstrung as an uncensored "puppets gone wild" cross between Avenue Q and Whose Line Is It Anyway?--and, admittedly, it is. But those distracted by the youthfully-skewing Twitter animations during intermission, or by the beers sold in the aisles, or all the merchandising opportunities, are missing the true diamond in the rough, crass, and generally hilarious skits. Emcee Patrick Bristow even says as much in his introduction (though this may be lost given his own Red Bull-driven puppetish behavior): you see, Stuffed and Unstrung is two shows in one. There's the potty-mouthed performance being filmed and projected to either side of the stage, but then there's also the sweet, romantic glimpse beneath the curtain (the camera, in this case): the comedians themselves, exposed for the romantic puppeteers they are.

Stuffed and Unstrung isn't just a collection of fifteen improvisatory games--like the puppets, it is  more than the sum of its parts. Instead, it is a love song to the genre, akin to Jay Johnston's The Two and Only, which featured expert ventriloquism as a means of telling a deeper story. Here, Brian Henson (who you may or not see on any given night--there's a rotating cast) uses puppetry to show the evolution of the genre, beginning--appropriately enough--with the hypothetical origins of the art: Neanderthals coping with mortality by crudely manipulating the corpse of an enemy. Mixed in with the skits are precise re-enactments of classic Jim Henson and Frank Oz skits, like 1956's "I've Grown Accustomed To Your Face" and 1965's "Java," along with demonstrations of special effects (similar to the looping technology solo musicians use, only with video) and of the "future" that is digital puppetry (demonstrated this evening by the talented Allan Trautman). As for the improv, it's nothing new, but it's distinctly more charming with puppets, perhaps because of the perversion of our expectations. (For instance, this night featured the superb Leslie Carrara-Rudolph as a groundhog giving a lecture on the fine art of pimping. Caught having to justify a random slide of a weird outfit: "This ain't Oktoberfest, this is Bitchfest.")

Though there's no way to guarantee the quality of any given night, Stuffed and Unstrung is diverse enough, both in its games and its puppeteering, that the two hours fly right by. There's even some audience interaction, including a skit that emphasizes just how talented the Henson crew is, and goes a long way to explain the lasting appeal of the Muppets. Hell, it's a blast just to look at all the diverse and comical characters--roughly eighty in all--that proudly hang on the wall: aliens that only speak a word at a time, bad bunnies, grossly expressive hot dogs, etc. At the same time, it's a thrill to find that the finale--a reprise of their original intro song "Puppet Up"--is just as entertaining done with literal hand-puppets (no strings attached) as it is when those hands are masked by one-tusked warthogs and myopic turtles. There's a reason you won't find Statler and Waldorf at this show: they know they'd have nothing bad to say.