THEATER: The Drowsy Chaperone

Photo/Bella Muccari

Robert Martin (Eric Weaver) is marrying Janet Van De Graaff (Whitney Branan), and it's the task of his best man, George (Colin Pritchard, doing a great Roger Bart), and her chaperone (Lorinne Lampert) to make sure that the two don't see one another before the ceremony. "That's it," announces Man-in-Chair (Craig Treubert). "That's the plot." That, in itself, would be humorous enough, as Greg Morrison and Lisa Lambert have nailed the jazzy numbers of the era they're paying homage to, and Bob Martin and Don McKellar have laced the script with enough puns and over-the-top characters to bowl anyone over. But that's only the plot of the musical The Drowsy Chaperone, which Man-in-Chair is listening to on his record player. The meatier "plot," which makes this a must-see for musical lovers -- even those who saw this five years ago on Broadway -- is the infectious way in which these simple tunes can uplift and potentially change the life of the listener. It's a romance -- as musicals tend to be -- but one that's between the musical and the audience, an entertaining clarification of the transporting love we hold for theater in the first place.

I missed the Broadway version, but given the imaginative nature of The Drowsy Chaperone, it translates well to the Gallery Players stage. Despite the lower budget, or perhaps because of it, director Hans Freidrichs embraces the cheesiness of some of his "spectacles" -- like the onstage airplane of "I Do, I Do in the Sky" or the synchronized swimming in "Show Off" -- and succeeds in making them all the more endearing. (The one exception is the off-stage orchestra, which, unfortunately, cannot leave its gaps up to the imagination.) Treubert, who played this role in the national tour, also aids in the off-off-Broadway translation: his meta-commentary, often delivered while perched giddily atop his chair or while dancing along, sweetly embraces even the foibles -- like an overly long spit-take scene that he abbreviates. In other words, by the design of the book, things go right even when they go wrong -- like when the record skips during "Toledo Surprise," causing the cast to repeat themselves, or when Man-in-Chair accidentally plays the opening number from a different musical during a disc change ("Message from a Nightingale"), taking the opportunity to remark on the limited range of some of its stars.

During a rendition of "Bride's Lament," in which De Graaff has a mini-breakdown that involves the ensemble wearing monkey masks with her face on the reverse, Man-in-Chair urges us to look past the absurd lyrics and to the heart underneath. This is the crux of The Drowsy Chaperone: it's a reminder that if you allow yourself to be entertained, there's no telling where you'll end up, or what significance you'll find in even the most cloying numbers. In that light, the vaudevillian gangsters (Aaron J. Libby and Trey Mitchell), in disguise as pastry chefs -- "I hope we have made ourselves perfectly eclair"; "I cannoli hope so" -- are a necessary evil. As the humorous icing on a B-plot involving the attempts of De Graaff's producer, Mr. Feldzieg (Robert Anthony Jones), and his ditsy assistant Kitty (Megan Rosenblatt), to sabotage the wedding, they serve as the dazzle under which Man-in-Chair can slide in his truisms about theater, especially the musical variety.

There's a reason, after all, why we applaud characters that are larger-than-life, like the scene-stealing "ladies' man" Aldolpho (Edward Juvier): can you blame us for occasionally wanting more out of life? And yet, Martin and McKellar are at their dramatic best when they sneak actual motivations into their characters: we learn that the actress (within the musical) who plays the Chaperone is an aging diva, which gives further context to her constant attempts to upstage her younger model, De Graaff, in the anthemic "As We Stumble Along." That's what makes Man-in-Chair such a potent character: he represents a link between the fantasy and the reality, giving us a touch of both the sublime and the tragic. His final, uplifting reprise is the same as the one you'll find overtly shouted on shows like Glee or fellow meta-musicals (like [title of show]): we can make that magic in the real world, too, if we dare to step outside and live a little.

THEATER: Laws of Motion

Photo/Michael Mahoney

It's the unscheduled delay on the local train that convinces Christopher (Gregg Mozgala) to fake a sneeze, hoping to catch the eye of the pretty girl, Anna (Sara Buffamanti) sitting next to him. But when Ashlin Halfnight's Laws of Motion cuts away from their twee romance -- he, a burgeoning writer with a dark imagination who is trapped working at Kinkos; she, a self-proclaimed scribefucker who says she works as a glassblower (but whose loud outfit and appointment book suggest she's blowing something else) -- it's the cardinal law of theater that these new threads are somehow going to tie into the plot. The result, which relies on a narrative trick for its dramatic punch, is a little too familiar and overwrought, but it is at least finely directed by Kristjan Thor, who uses the trick of placing multiple scenes in the same plane (but not the same place) and the reconfiguration of the shared set into unique signifiers for each couple, to show how we are all at once connected and separate.

Among the three additional plots speeding through Laws of Motion are the tales of a failing marriage between Markus (Daniel Piper Kublick) and Bella (Sarah Matthay), and the redefined relationship between Carlo (Joseph Gallina) and his ex-wife, the brassy Lonnie (Gisela Chipe), who are working through their own issues for the sake of their rebelling teenage daughter, Sammy: these love-lost relationships at least serve as a counterbalance to the burgeoning romance between Christopher and Anna. But it's harder to fit the spoiled rich Jolene (Jessica Cummings) and her cousin Dominic (Matthew Pilieci) into the plot. Dominic's simply there to be a shoulder to cry on (and expositionally talk into), and given the stated conventions of the play, savvy viewers will quickly realize (and grow impatient) that the tragedy that has reduced Jo to coke binges and "therapeutic" S&M sessions with Mistress Fiona (an unconvincing, but sweet, Amy Newhall) must have something to do with the unspecified train delay that opened the play. Going off on further diluted tangents are Markus's colleague, Cooper (Jason Alazraki), an overconfident asshole of the Mamet variety, and Gordon (Michael Criscuolo), an angry Kinko's patron. Like Fiona and Dominic, these characters are inert; wheels which serve to spin the other characters -- and needlessly so, given the play's final destination.

Pared down, Laws of Motion offers glimpses of the slick mechanism that has surely guided so many of Halfnight's other plays. The loss of a child has made it difficult for Bella to forgive her husband Markus, but their attempts to overcome that impenetrable wall make for compelling theater, the sort with clear obstacles that force their characters to grow. Comparatively, the Lonnie/Carlo scenes lack urgency and the Jo scenes lack agency; with nothing to fight for, even solid actors like Chipe and Pilieci wind up stuck in a rut. You may go for Buffamanti's wide-eyed charm and Kublick's solid desperation, but there's no law that says you can't miss this one.

THEATER: Apple Cove

Photo/Carol Rosegg

"Oh, we'd be so adult here," says Alan (Erin Gann), giddily ogling the newest lot in his father-in-law's precious gated community. How better to prove one's manhood, after all, than by playing a game of house? "Look! Here I am in our yard. Trimming the hedges. Whoops! I nicked myself. 'Honey! I nicked myself!'" His equally childish wife, Edie (Allison Mack), eagerly plays along, carefully describing the things she has been raised to believe denote adulthood and America: "I get the first aid kit, third drawer on the left of the faux marble wax-fruit bowl, I sprint down the hall covered in a 22-count, lavender, plush-pile carpet, and I bandage you. I grab a Puffs and blow my nose. Oh! It has aloe in it!" Lynn Rosen's Apple Cove, the latest in a string of solid productions from Women's Project, doesn't get much heavier than that, but as a light send-up of our carefully closeted "values," succeeds in being dizzyingly entertaining.

Like Christopher Durang, Rosen wastes no time in getting unhinged, relying on the theatrical equivalent of funhouse mirrors (grotesque exaggeration) to reflect the perils and limitations of leading a cloistered, ultra-conservative life. Edie's father, Gary (Paul Carlin), may have paved over Bear Swamp to build his community, but as the play skips between seasons and Edie's curiosities (amongst other things) are aroused by a worldly security guard, Duke (Dion Mucciacito), they'll all learn that nature cannot be limned -- for long -- by rules. And although the play is overstuffed and unnecessarily direct, Giovanna Sardelli's decision not to edit -- to let these elements run rampant -- actually works: Gary's second wife, Mary (Kathy Searle), who is half Stepford and half evil Stepmother, is so loud that she powers through the vacuousness of her role, and you can actually hear the Sarah Palin in her as she announces, "We bombed the Japs, remember? And now they're fine. See, Edie? Adjustion."

Further enhancing the production is Scott Bradley's pastel-hued set, so gloriously subdued that its hidden surprises -- a rampant vine, a cracking wall, a slide-out crib -- bring a genuine sense of transformation with them. Such aesthetics go hand-in-hand with Amy Clark's costumes, which have the delightfully unsettling effect of actually looking like costumes, in the sense that these are people attempting to convince themselves that they are something more than they are, from the little-kid shorts Edie wears in the first scene to the way Alan's work clothes always seem too large on him, whether it's the ridiculous green vest of Rec World or the suit he wears to his father-in-law's firm.

Such pop-up-book looks fit the explosive nature of the over-the-top acting, particularly the stellar performances of the tear-throttling Carlin and sharp-tongued Searle. Gann and Mack, who have more of an arc to their characters, are saddled with a more difficult task, but for the most part, succeed. Rosen's "four scenes, four seasons" structure has a variety of built-in routines, and Mack's blithe distortions of them trigger some great reactions from the tightly wound Gann: the highlight of Apple Cove is Edie's attempt to sexually awaken the repressed Alan -- a dirty dance made all the more humorous by Edie's awkward and clumsy motions . . . and the fact that it occurs in their imaginary son's crib. (Given the phonetics of Alan and Edie, the play's title, and the paradise-with-rules setting, I'm tempted to talk about how this all relates to Adam and Eve, but honestly, Rosen does nothing with the concept beyond suggesting it.)

Given all the similarities to Durang -- especially his recent and very flawed Why Torture Is Wrong . . . And the People Who Love Them -- it's important to point out that Rosen's greatest triumph is that despite all the bending-out-of-shape antics, Apple Cove actually has a solid ending. It's benign, and far from groundbreaking, but isn't it true, after all, that in order to appreciate all that wildness, one must have some sense of its difference from order?

THEATER: Lathem Prince

Photo/Michael Mahoney

Lathem (Kris Kling) is chilling in the cemetery with his bro Patio (Bryan Grossbauer), smoking some bud to take the edge off his father's recent death, a possible murder that's incorrectly, but hilariously, described as "Exactly like Othello, except your dad was white." Playwright Ashlin Halfnight (whose name is not an anagram of William Shakespeare's) has the two talking apace about ghosts and babies, at which point the hero of Lathem Prince abruptly mounts the long table, tripping back to a time shortly after his birth, a time, even then, when his mother, Gertie (Cindy Keiter), was a bit crazy and his father, William (Ralph Petrarca), had already begun his drunken descent. "This is confusing," says Lathem, removing the pacifier from his mouth. "Where are we?" Determined to keep things frantic but followable, director Kristjan Thor conjures up William's spirit -- back in the graveyard now, keep up! -- and has him go through the stereotypical moans of a ghost, bathrobe up around his head, before the man turns around, perfectly normal, whiskey in hand, to address his son, and reveal the mundanity of death: "We have a buffet." (The omelet bar costs extra.)

But wait, wait, let's go back to the beginning, to a point before Gertie posted naked pictures of herself in a national porno, attracting the attentions of the French-Detroit Claude (Michael McGregor Mahoney) -- an irrationally happy and long-schlonged dude who likes to boast about being an uncle -- all the way back, poolside, to the day that Hamlet met Ophelia ... [ahem], that Lathem met Lia (Hanna Cheek), he playing the smoldering loner card ("I was abandoned at birth; a park ranger found me, in a tundra"), she flirting haplessly, a fluttery and excitable "fish-bird" of a girl whose sexual urges (and wardrobe) eerily resemble those of Lathem's mother. Lost in that exuberant run-on? Titillated? Good: Lathem Prince is a fragmentary, hyperactive, comic romp; it's a memory play in the hands of a delusional, and depressed narrator; it's become, by the end, a remixed tone poem ("Onomatoepeia mother fucker!"), the sort of modern, sexed-up adaptation MTV would do if it had balls and a smarter audience.

By throwing caution to the wind, Halfnight's produced his most insanely quotable show, and has given Thor the opportunity to shine as a director. Working under the relatively set-less conditions of Halfnight's "Theater in the Dark, With Lights" series (which also includes the premiere of Laws of Motion and a revival of God's Waiting Room), Thor aggressively uses the space, with scenes occurring in spotlit split-screen (Lathem and Gertie look through the same box of pictures, but at different points in time; likewise, as Lathem loses his virginity, he is simultaneously being conceived), characters diving over the central table (or carrying on atop it), and turning innocent objects -- a potted plant, a fishbowl, a boombox -- into powerful signifiers.

Lathem Prince is also blessed with a terrific cast, the sort who know how to take things just far enough -- which is often further than you'd think -- without playing "full crazy." Kling's understated frustrations and deepening paranoia lead to some interestingly staged dreams/realities, a picture that more than measures up to the thousand words of, say, "To be, or not to be," and which serves him well as the set-upon center of the play. As for Cheek, her time spent in Clay McLeod Chapman's Pumpkin Pie Show has prepared her well for playing an empathetic yet increasingly crazy character, the sort who puts her boyfriend's used condoms in the freezer and excitedly/obsessively quotes old love letters. Keiter's a real find, too, pairing her shrill tones and small size with some disturbingly deadpan lines: "Come here and I'll crown you with my vagina."

Lathem Prince is a terrifically silly night at the theater, though watch out -- if you stop laughing (or laugh too hard) you might just find yourself in tears, for funny or not, this is a tragedy. An over-the-top tragedy.

THEATER: The Witch of Edmonton

Between each of Red Bull Theater's productions, one can just imagine artistic director Jesse Berger sitting in a dark corner of a rehearsal space, plotting and scheming, using their excellent reading series to let the diabolical rhythms of their staple, Jacobean theater, sink in. No wonder, then, that their yearly production tends to swing toward tales of bloody revenge: not just because that topic was a crowd-pleaser then (as it is now), but because the machinations and deliberations fit the technical mind scaffolding each of Berger's shows. The Witch of Edmonton, however, is missing that structure. At least three playwrights collaborated to rush this to the theater in 1621, trying to keep apace with history as it was happening, and rather than try to understand the human motivations, they chalk all the evil up to a demon Dog. The result, which promises "Mirth and Matter," delivers only Muddle.

In the first of three plots, attributed by scholars to John Ford, Frank Thorney (Justin Blanchard) has secretly married his fellow servant, Winifred (Miriam Silverman), but begs his lord, Sir Arthur (Christopher Innvar), to hide this fact from his father, Thorney (Christopher McCann), lest he wind up being disowned. As a result of his seeming bachelorhood, however, he is pressed by his father to marry Susan (Christina Pumariega), a sinful second marriage that he consents to because of the massive dowry provided by Susan's rich father, Carter (Sam Tsoutsouvas). In his attempts to run off with the money, he winds up compelled (by an encounter with the Dog) to kill Susan, and to pin her murder on Warbeck (Craig Baldwin), Susan's sniveling former wooer, and Somerton (Carman Lacivita), who still pursues Susan's sister, Katherine (Amanda Quaid).

There's enough here for a full-length play, so it's obvious that something has to give: in this case, it's any attempt to develop character. Susan turns from a sharp-tongued lass, deflecting the advances of Warbeck, into a love-struck girl, and then a melodramatic wife, clutching at her husband to stay a moment longer; Warbeck and Somerton are sketchier than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; for some unknown reason, save that half a dozen other plays of the time did so, Winifred masquerades as Frank's manservant; Arthur, who appears briefly in only two scenes, is rumored to be the father of Winifred's unborn child; and not a single one of Frank's actions seem grounded in anything, particularly love, given how icy and almost aloof his chemistry is with the entire cast. People are twisted out of sorts in order to deliver monologues or moderately snappy dialogues on the meaning of virtue or guilt; it's the op-ed page, in theatrical form. 

Mind you, there are two other plots, too, or at least attributed contributions from Thomas Dekker and William Rowley: Elizabeth Sawyer (Charlayne Woodard), who was once smart enough to have learned Latin, is now an old, withered woman, foraging for firewood on other people's farmland. Old Banks (Andre De Shields), for some reason, cannot stand that theft -- although he relents when she pretends to be a witch in order to drive him back. Conveniently, she soon becomes a real witch (the one of the play's title, though she's notably the B-plot of this affair), entering into contract with the Dog (Derek Smith); although it's ironic that at this point, now that she actually has powers, Banks has the willpower to return with the Justice (Raphael Nash Thompson) and take her to the pyre.

None of these characters have real motivations for their actions, save for bile and other humors, which is where the third plot comes in, disarming us with its comedy and salvaging much of the show. Cuddy Banks (the excellent, born-to-play-Aguecheek Adam Green), the witless son of Old Banks, begs the supposed Witch to help him get out of his own bewitchment, for he has fallen for Katherine. Instead, she leads him on a wild goose chase through the woods, a humiliating and spirit-laden affair that, oddly enough, ends with him befriending the Dog, who he treats simply as a marvelous talking dog. Because Green plays clueless so well, we're happy to go along with his nonsensical adventures with the Dog, and it's a nice opportunity for Smith, who is wise enough to play his role as the straight (albeit sinister) man, to use his physicality to the fullest.

Setting the play (or plays) aside, however, Berger has once again done a fine job with the actual staging. Anka Lupes's clever set places half the audience on stage -- as jurors, bystanders, villagers, whatever -- and balances the wildness and danger of the woods (a sloping, dirt-strewn center) with the law and order of the town (the wooden planks surrounding the dirt, complete with towers and a rather overt gallows). It's fair to say that the show makes more of a statement visually than textually, with Cait O'Connor's costumes speaking to the contrast between the well-off and the poor -- most notably in the ragged raiment of the Dog, who looks a bit like Jack Sparrow. But although Berger handles chaos well, like a chase between Old Ratcliffe and his wife (both played by a very quick-changing Everett Quinton), he handles order poorly, getting bogged down in The Witch of Edmonton's long stretches of talky emptiness.