THEATER: Cactus Flower

Photo/Carol Rosegg

Stephanie Dickinson (Lois Robbins) is a prickly nurse, which is to be expected: for years she's been reduced to nothing more than a potted fixture beside her boss, Dr. Julian Winston (Maxwell Caulfield), a dashing dentist with a penchant for "drilling" the ladies. In fact, she's a lot like the cactus she keeps at her desk, and if you can't guess by the title of the play -- Cactus Flower -- or the far-from-subtle hints playwright Abe Burrows keeps dropping, even dour Ms. Dickinson will eventually blossom. However, the same can't be said for the rest of this production, a choked and clumsy affair aridly directed by Michael Bush, a man with one too many screws loose in this altogether forgettable screwball comedy.

Here's the plot: Winston has been sleeping with the adorably high-pitched Toni Simmons (Jenni Barber) for the last year. But she, wanting more, attempts suicide -- she is saved by her nerdy neighbor Igor Sullivan (Jeremy Bobb) -- which leads Winston to realize how much he loves her after all. This, however, is a problem, since to avoid a clingy relationship, he's been pretending that he's already married, and the one thing Toni hates is a lie. Enter Ms. Dickinson -- now masquerading as Mrs. Winston -- and cue the complications, like Harvey Greenfield (Anthony Reimer), a lecherous college friend of Winston's who is hired to be the other man in this "unhappy" marriage. Except it's not all that complicated at all: in an orderly and easily resolved fashion, Burrows introduces one-note characters like Senor Arturo Sanchez (John Herrera), an unctuous diplomat with the hots for an uninterested Ms. Dickinson, and Botticelli's Springtime (Emily Walton), the sort of witless floozy who falls for someone as sleazy as Harvey. Each enters, cracks bad jokes, and leaves, leaving no ripples in their wake, just wasted time and opportunity . . . unless, of course, you thought the only thing missing from this travesty of a play was a rich older woman (Robin Skye) flirting with her dentist.

For a show whose main character is a dentist, Cactus Flower has surprisingly few teeth, and Caulfield's utterly ungrounded performance doesn't help matters. Manic from the first moment we meet him, and many decibels above the rest of the cast, it's hard to take him seriously: he doesn't pivot from tactic to tactic so much as he bullishly charges with every line. Then again, at least he's consistently bad; Robbins, who should be the sharp spark at the center of the play, appears convinced that changing her clothes is enough to transform on stage; she gets more lines toward the end of the play, as she gives her boss the ol' what-for, but she delivers them in a half-hearted "What for?" In this way, the performances resemble Anna Louizos's bland set, which attempts to multitask the same bedroom backdrop for scenes that occur in the doctor's office, a cocktail bar, and record store: it all disconcertingly blends together, as if none of it matters.

One "witty" exchange in the play goes as follows: "I'm an actor." "Isn't acting an insecure position?" "Only financially." In the case of this shriveled Cactus Flower -- $75 a ticket -- it's safe to say that the acting's far more insecure than the money going into it.

Short-a-Day: Robert Coover's "Going For A Beer"

Originally published in The New Yorker, March 14th, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 53.

Coover, he of the experimental concept stories. Here's a life, told through the vague and gauzy view of a drunkard, always lapsing in and out of consciousness, years passing by in a flash, and perhaps that's not so much different from our own sober lives, in some respect, in that suddenly days, weeks, years have passed, and what of it? "Well . . . you know . . . life, he says to the nurse who has come to pull the sheet over his face and wheel him away," ends this one-page story. I can't help but compare this, unfavorably, to Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly," which ran last June. The sentences there were rich with details; here, because of the character, they're sort of muddled and shrugged off. Which is, I suppose, one way of looking at life, but perhaps I'm a beer half full sort of guy, and this is a half empty sort of tale. Still, it succeeds at what it (unambitiously, perhaps) wants to do, and the jarring jumps in time are at least an interesting device:

He decides that it's time to call the affair off -- she's driving him crazy -- but then the brawny dude turns up at their wedding and apologizes for the pounding he gave him.

Life is sort of funny that way, all things considered, once you compress it. There is, however, one weak section in which the protagonist

decides to check whether he still has the job that he had when he first met her. He does. His absence, if he has been absent, is not remarked on, but he is not congratulated on his marriage either, no doubt because -- it comes back to him now -- before he met his wife he was engaged to one of his colleagues and their co-workers had already thrown them an engagement party, so they must resent the money they spent on gifts.

This is a bit confusing, and petty, and perhaps redundant in the scope of what the rest of the story is already achieving in its narrow focus on bars and beds. But later, when I don't remember this story, will it matter? In any case, for those interested in just how diverse Coover's style is, check out his story from Harper's last July, "The War Between Sylvania and Freedonia," which was, incidentally the first of these posts I made.

THEATER: Feeder: A Love Story

Photo/Jill Steinberg

Jesse (Jennifer Conley Darling) lies there in a hospital bed, sipping lime water through a straw. In flashbacks, her husband Noel (Pierre Marc-Diennet) enters through the door and lovingly feeds her; in the present, a gaping hole in the wall reminds us what it took -- after years of their food-fetish relationship -- to excavate all seven hundred and three immobile pounds of her from their apartment. Far from a condemnation of "feederism," however, Feeder sticks to the tragedy of its subtitle ("A Love Story"), and playwright James Carter succeeds in sincerely shedding (or gaining) light on a subculture most of us know nothing of. "To me," says Noel, "obesity isn't gruesome, it's gorgeous," and if the seventy minute play doesn't quite convince you of that (it's a lot to take in), their incredibly detailed pre- and post-show blogs (jessennoel.blogspot.com has posts dating back to 2008) help both to blur the lines of reality and to continue the story.

In a series of twinned monologues, we learn of Noel's earliest fantasies -- of Bertha, the fat lady in a circus coloring book -- and how, when they first met at Carmine's, Jesse was the confident, sexual master of their relationship. From Jesse, we learn how she felt overshadowed by her successful, younger sister, but found a welcoming community of people like Noel who embraced her own beauty (linkstobeauty.tumblr.com): "He loved me inside and out." Magic happens as the play turns to scene work between the two: it really is a love story, a relationship as normal as any other with the exception of its daily, page-long grocery lists. How different, ultimately, is Jesse's reliance on Noel than that of Noel's grandfather caring for his stroke-victim wife: "He bathed her . . . changed her catheter . . . read to her. It's the truest love I've ever seen." It all boils down to how you view it, and Feeder, lovingly directed by Jose Zayas (and never overboard with the sexual details or masticatory mechanics), has us accepting their relationship, even after we hear of Rosalie Bradford (who has lost over 900 pounds) and Carol Yager (who, at one point, hit 1600 pounds).

The tragedy, of course, comes from Carter's narrative, which begins with Noel vlogging about his wife's "abduction"; we'll spend the rest of the play learning what led Jesse to abandon their mutual goal of hitting the elite thousand-pound goal. These shifts are assisted by Peter Ksander's scenic design, which conflates the present and past locations into one, and Alex Koch's video and projection design, which enables us to view the live footage through a YouTube filter. One of the more effective portions of the show is a normalizing montage that a heartbroken Noel posts to the web, a "best of" clip-show of Jesse's weight gain, set to Wayne Fontana & The Mindbender's "The Game of Love."  But the purest bits of the show are those most simply communicated by the truly impressive Darling. Watch how the lovestruck twinkle in her eyes slowly begins to fade -- especially after a small fire and a creaking crane remind her of her immobility -- and collapses into a disappointed regret as she looks back on abandoning her lifestyle for a liquid diet.

The one downside to Feeder is that it's so carefully structured that it seems more documentary than drama. Because the "villain" of the piece -- diet witch Judith Angel -- never appears, and only one scene occurs after her notorious "intervention" interview, the play mostly focuses on how these two wound up living together. This somewhat submissive-dominant relationship leaves room for only one argument -- presented as a mild disagreement -- and the final scene offers a too-pat resolution. Still, so far as details and quirky romance go, Feeder will leave you more than sated, and for those who already follow this community, that may be catharsis enough.

Short-a-Day: Mary Gaitskill's "The Other Place"

Originally published in The New Yorker, Feb. 14 & 21, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 11.

I never thought of killing Jenna. I didn't think about killing anyone I actually knew--not the girls I didn't like at school or the few I had sex with. The first time I had sex, I was so caught up in the feeling of it that I didn't even think about killing--I didn't think about anything at all. But I didn't have sex much. I was small, awkward, too quiet; I had that tremor. My expression must've been strange as I sat in class, feeling hidden in my other place, but outwardly visible to whoever looked--not that many did.

I suppose, if you wanted to, you could read Gaitskill's short as being about the suppression of the violent urges we know most people to have (at some point in their life), or as an attempt to describe a certain type of character, the unrealized psychopath. But given leading paragraphs like the one above, Gaitskill seems to be using the hints of violence not to warn of the next Columbine, but to explore the isolation that some people feel, the cold disconnect from this reality that threatens to leave them stranded in the "other" place, a place that they can only exit through acts of measured violence. (After all, neither the narrator nor his son Doug, actually break in the story, and he even points out that "You have to go pretty far afield to find something people would call abnormal these days.")

Personally, I think Gaitskill handles the subject matter rather clumsily -- first, in attempting the male point of view, and second in her descriptions of this "other" place: "I would go invisibly into an invisible world that I called 'the other place.' Where I sometimes passively watched a killer and other times became one." Why the repetition of "invisible"? It's already stressed by the rest of the story and blatant descriptions. Additionally, our narrator needs someone to be speaking to -- or a reason to be speaking, like a Raskolnikovic confession, a Humbertian remembrance. Here, our narrator vaguely uses his own thirteen-year-old son's obsession with toy guns to passively consider the "other place": "How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally."

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THEATER: Invasion!

A famous tragedy once wondered, "What's in a name?", but it's doubtful that Shakespeare, a master of double-talk and other precise tricks of English, ever thought that question would come so far as it has in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's Invasion!, a brilliant play that uses aggressively overt scenes about the dangers of language to mask the subtler implications of politics -- or, in a clever twist, vice-versa. For the producing Play Company, it is also a culmination of their tireless work to find voices from around the globe: their work here, potently directed by Erica Schmidt and translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles, utilizes the meta-theatrics of Bad Jazz, the narrative distance (and, as a result, closeness) of Enjoy, and the intensity of Rainbow Kiss.

After a surprising opening that pokes fun at the old-school formality of the romantic era (a near-unintelligible scene from Carl Jonas Love Almquist's Signora Luna), Invasion! continues to mask its true intents by following two rough kids, Arvind and Yousef (Debargo Sanyal and Bobby Moreno), casually hanging out at school, and then -- smoothly cutting to a few years later -- at a bar, where a nervous Arvind attempts to pick up the very attractive Lara (Francis Benhamou). A running gag quickly changes into the play's thematic gist, as the name "Abulkasem" (appropriated from the Almquist) is used as a catch-all for the kids (e.g., "Shit, I'm mad Abulkasem, I was up watching movies all night..."), and as Arvind's more "confident" alias. All of this, of course, works in favor of the abrupt tonal shift that comes with the second scene, in which a panel of experts discuss Abulkasem's birth.

Instead of these shifts being off-putting, they're engrossing: given the innocence of Abulkasem's origin, we're as eager as the experts are to find out how this character became -- as we are led to believe -- a dangerous terrorist. That sound, incidentally, is Khemiri's intellectual trap swinging shut: a third scene, which plays in parallel to both the first and second, focuses on Lara's perspective of Arvind's tic-filled flirations, and her subsequent conversations with her own panel of "experts," a bunch of know-everything graduate students, who are presented here as all too easily obsessed over the merest of scraps of information, driven to lie (or agree) in an attempt to posture for intellectual superiority. It becomes more about saying things than about meaning things, which gives Khemiri ample opportunity to aggressively distort his initial scenes and turn more directly into affecting satire. The panel refers to all the previous incarnations of Abulkasem as one and the same -- resolving the differences in sex and location as disguises, pointless as they may be: "And once, when he wakes up in a damp, stained hotel room in Arizona, he goes so far as to cover the original birthmark with makeup and to put the fake one in EXACTLY the same spot!"  And it's here that the trap clamps down a degree further, for are we even sure at this point that Abulkasem is a threat, much less a terrorist?

The play is only seventy-five minutes long, but captures the deeper implications of a play several times that length by jumping so easily between characters and scenes, touching on each just long enough to throw our perceptions out of the window. We first meet A (Andrew Guilarte) as Yousef's uncle, an actual Abulkasem who struggles to make ends meet as an exterminator so that he can dress up and attempt to make it as a drag dancer, Lance. He's a real live version of the American Dream, but his short vignette ends with soldiers taking sharpies to his face, telling him to "Go Home," a far from welcoming treatment. As the host interviewing the panel, he'll slowly betray his own doubts -- particularly as the "experts" begin to pull their facts out of thin air, referring erroneously to slide after slide. Most effective, however, is his appearance as a soon-to-be-deported (and possibly tortured) apple picker: he calls in a translator (Benhamou) to assist him, only to realize that she is literally putting words into his mouth, culminating with a hopeless series of exchanges in which he says nothing, only for her to translate them anyway: "When the video tape was ready, I put on the dynamite belt and left my home."

When words are cheap, when ideas can be made to mean anything, when we can point to empty statistics ("Abulkasem has crossed the Atlantic and we immediately see an increase in the number of rapes") and laugh, then what good is reality? The play ends with a lengthy monologue by Bobby (Moreno), an actor portraying the playwright's younger brother, who stands there, remembering his inspiration for Invasion!, and though his emotions are gripping and real, so too is the great potential for misunderstanding and misrepresentation. If a war on terror can, in fact, be fought, then we must acknowledge that the war's ammunition is verbal, not physical. Invasion!, then, should be the shot heard round the world; open your ears and grab your tickets now.