THEATER: I'll Be Home For "A Civil War Christmas"

Photo/Carol Rosegg

It's Christmas Eve, 1864, and Paula Vogel is shining a spotlight on three wise American men as they momentarily step back from the brink of their war and enjoy a moment of peace. Hark, a rueful Robert E. Lee (Sean Allan Krill) refuses, out of solidarity with his impoverished troops, to drink hot coffee or rest his bones! O, how General Ulysses S. Grant (Chris Henry) is prodded toward victory by his sobering aide-de-camp Ely Parker (Jonathan-David). Hear, of course, President Abraham Lincoln (Bob Stillman), in all his stove-piped glory, as he allows an enigmatic dream to worry its way under his skin. Now, forget about all these characters -- we're about to be introduced to at least a dozen more, and you'll not hear from Lee or Grant again -- because in this patchwork play, Vogel could care less about these potent historical figures. She's after that holy atmosphere found in those tales of Christmas miracles, and while she achieves it, that's no great achievement in itself: the thematic structure of "clever" conveniences, collusions, and collisions is made no less hokey by the educational setting of A Civil War Christmas.

With the utmost of respect for Vogel and her director, Tina Landau, A Civil War Christmas is a beautiful and occasionally touching tale, but it is also -- and more often -- hectic and manipulative nonsense, propelled by insistent and omniscient narrators and livened by carols. Alice Ripley, who does a fine, dare I say brave, job as Mary Todd Lincoln is at times made out to be a bipolar buffoon on the search for the perfect Christmas tree (when comic relief is called for), while at others provides a calm and somber entrance into a military hospital, where the dying soldiers call out for a mysterious figure who is half Walt Whitman, half Santa Claus. The play flits from interesting fact to interesting fact, all the while largely forgetting to itself be interesting, and the tonal imbalance and large gabs between individuals prevents any chords from standing out, let alone developing into anything close to a harmonious whole. In fact, when the entire cast sings a carol, it's difficult to determine where to even look: each character's doing their own abstract thing. There's a brief romance between a mule and a horse on opposite ends of the Potomac; there are moral reminders that some Union soldiers were Jewish, and had their own prayers and songs; there's a freeman out for vengeance on the confederates who kidnapped his wife: are we watching War Horse, Lincoln, or Django Unchained?

The few tatters of outstanding material in the play all use echoes to sustain themselves: with each stitch that Elizabeth Keckley (Karen Kandel) makes in a Christmas shawl, she is haunted by flashbacks of her dead son and her escape from slavery; Decatur Bronson (K. Todd Freeman) keeps using work to distract him from his phantasmal wife, which gives poignancy to the moment when we learn what her cryptic message means. Much like Keckley's stitching, then, these are scenes that build upon themselves and use repetition to stitch themselves more firmly into our minds. It's far harder to find significance in the misadventures of young Raz (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), who runs away from her snoring father to enlist in the Confederate army, or to feel much for the plight of the young, hypothermically hallucinating Jessa (Sumaya Bouhbal), who spends much of her time on stage smiling at would-be slave-catchers. They serve as objects for other characters to react to, or as set-up for some of the more intricate coincidences that result in Lincoln narrowly avoiding an ambush by John Wilkes Booth (Krill, who is outstandingly bombastic in this role) and in Jessa's reunion with her frantic mother, Hannah (Amber Iman, a terrific singer).

To one side of the New York Theater Workshop space, a multitude of hats and jackets dangle from hooks. To the other, there are black and white photographs of these characters, hung from long white strings. But it takes more than quick costume changes and basic dramaturgy to mount a play, especially when ambiguous and unclear choices keep emphasizing the fact that a play is being mounted before your eyes. Why bother with authentic costumes (and some distracting modern ones) when the stage is, for the most part, bare? Why keep adding characters to an already addled script -- like a pacifist Quaker -- if they're only there to provide someone else with a chance for exposition? All the props and photos in the world won't help with such choices, and despite some genuinely touching moments, A Civil War Christmas feels like a research paper that's still scrawled out on index cards.

THEATER: Performance Anxieties: Reviews of "The Performers" and "Barking Girl"

The Performers is about adult industry stars and their large endowments, but the Broadway stage must be cold or something, because these outsize-stars are shriveling up under the lights. (The fact that the show is closing on Sunday has little to do with it, though that may explain why both Alicia Silverstone and Ari Graynor appeared to be losing their voices.) Only Henry Winkler, as the still-in-the-game-legend Chuck Wood, manages to make the jokes more than cheap. When he bellows "They give me the front row because I need the room . . . for my cock!" or makes blatant puns about his penis, you're made to understand that his pride's the one thing he has left. His young rival, Mandrew (Cheyenne Jackson), while being interviewed by an old high-school friend, Lee (Daniel Breaker), only has room to showcase his insecurities; likewise with Mandrew's wife, Peeps (Ari Graynor), whose entrance is a long tirade about her tit size.

This is the thrust of the play (pun intended, and there's not a low blow this show doesn't take -- pun again, intended), and so as Peeps worries that her old friend (and girl-on-girl co-star) Sundown LeMay (Jenni Barber) may be stealing Mandrew with her giant new knockers, Lee worries that his high-school sweetheart and fiancee Sara (Alicia Silverstone), who is meant to be an endearingly demure high-school math teacher, won't be happy with his lack of adventure, while she worries that, because he's literally a one-woman man, he won't be satisfied with her. Suffice it to say that they all come together (not literally, although the pun's still intended: do you get the groaning repetition yet?) in the cheesiest, shallowest, and most contrived of fashions. Peeps confides in Sara and suggests a Freaky Friday swap, Sara attempts to make Lee jealous by drunkenly falling all over Chuck Wood, Sundown LeMay offers Lee the Porn Star Experience (splits!), and none of this is farcical so much as sad, though adroitly performed by the majority of the cast.

There are genuine laughs in The Performers -- Mandrew attempting to prove his acting chops by reciting one of the monologues from Precious, for example, or Peeps's attempts to follow a teleprompter -- but very little else that doesn't feel plastic. The re-enactments of porn scenes (without any nudity) are awkward and unfunny (the plot of a blue film hardly needs to be spoofed, after all), the women are far too uniformly presented as dumb, and even Evan Cabnet's direction feels stilted, most notably during a cat-fight that breaks out during an awards ceremony. Consider, however, the way the play ends, with the moralizing line, "It's not your brain I want, it's your (pause) heart." This is meant to be a sweet surprise, but it's totally unearned. And while it may be a surprise that playwright David West Read at last avoids coming right out with the dick joke, it's only sweet in the sense (as Chuck Wood puts it) of a money shot that doesn't hit you in the eyes.

Susan Bernfield's Barking Girl, on the other hand, is a series of micro-scenes spanning the growth of Rae (Adina Taubman) over ten or so years, from her initial worry at what the child inside her may become (would it be like the out-of-control barking girl she sees at a museum?) to what the child itself eventually is: "You are so much like him. And so much like me." But the play is oddly devoid of action, and Pirronne Yousefzadeh's direction takes things a step further, in that the characters are almost always sitting down or standing still, as if they are locked within themselves. For Rae, this somewhat makes sense, but the result is that she's never allowed to change -- she's always tense, whether with her husband, Gil (Max Arnaud), sister Becca (Meg MacCary), or the Sexy Guy (Tom O'Keefe) who keeps flirting with her, only to be rebuffed by her sense of matriarchal responsibility.

Time flies, and it's hard to feel that we know these characters so much as the general ennui and dread that their scenarios represent: Rae worries that she's not the cool mother, gets frustrated at the projectile vomiting and the lack of a social life, doesn't know how to approach other mothers -- in fact, hates the term "mother" at all, in that it labels her. There are some fine musings, and serene, peaceful writing, but it really needs to be driven by more of a conflict or united by a tighter series of echoes. (The sparseness of the set may play a part in this: Two tin cans attached by a string are a great image, but they shouldn't be the only image.) As is, when Gil dies -- suddenly, and off-stage, with Rae alerted by phone -- it's hard to tell exactly what's happening. Neither of the two scenes addressing this take more than a minute or so (together), and such compression leaves the show with no room to breathe, let alone to scream or bark.

(One quick disclaimer: at the performance of Barking Girl that I attended, loud music from the accompanying space permeated the theater. This is problematic in of itself, but for a quiet and contemplative play like this, makes it difficult to focus. Subtleties may have been missed; emotions may have been muted. Having read through the script, I don't think it makes all that much of a difference, but it's certainly something that didn't help.)

THEATER: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: A Review of "How to Break"

Photo/Benjamin Heller

 If How to Break were an actual hip-hop track, it would be defined by the solid chorus and rhythmic structure that bridges the dramatic beat(boxing) surrounding the cancer diagnosis and treatments of Ana (Amber Williams), a fiercely independent 18-year-old popper, and her in-hospital romance with Joel (Pedro Morillo), a brash and flirtatious DJ who refuses to be constrained by his sickle-cell. But it would also be weighed down by a contributing artist's silly and ultimately sloppy guest verse in which their street-wise and serious doctor, Aden (Dan Domingues), falls for the hospital's breezy and hippy-like artist-in-residence, Maddy (Roberta Burke). Although Aaron Jafferis is credited with the book and lyrics, he's had to tie those in with Adam Matta and Yako 440's live score (Yako 440 plays a nurse, layering in the sound from heartbeats to complex rhythms), Kwikstep and Rokafella's introductory choreography (light animation, popping, breaking), and Rebecca Hart's music (I'm assuming for the folksier, acoustic numbers that Maddy strums and sings). There are moments where this all shines under Christopher V. Edwards's direction, particularly in the piece's climax (thanks in large part to the unifying video design by Dave Tennent and Kate Freer), but the majority of How to Break is distractingly disjointed and, worse, artificial, a sad truth that's at serious odds with the play's underlying message to "be real."

Photo/Benjamin Heller

That said, props to How to Break for remixing Emily Dickinson's "Hope is a thing with feathers" and for tapping into various forms of modern teen expression to deal, often honestly, with the way we cope with disease. It's always refreshing to watch pessimism and optimism throw down; I only wish it felt a little more free-styled, It'd be nice, too, if Jafferis didn't feel it necessary to have Aden and Madden repeat the arguments already made by Ana and Joel -- particularly in a ridiculous yoga-studio setting -- and if he were able to be a little less literal with the dancing. Early on, as Ana gets her diagnosis, we see her step outside her body to release her mental tension with some dance; most other places, Joel is merely demonstrating his positive thinking by spinning a few moves through the pain.

How to Break wants to be ill, not sickly -- and I'm afraid it's going to need a stronger prescription to do so.

THEATER: Time Enough At Last: A Review of the New York Neo-Futurists' "On the Future"

Thirty plays an hour. Two to twelve new plays a week. All year long. Even with a revolving ensemble, that's a daunting task for any theater company, especially a non-illusory one like the New York Neo-Futurists. So it makes sense that they'd take some time off to . . . wait, what's that? On the Future isn't a vacation, it's a terrific evening of six aggressively meditative, earnestly inquisitive, and/or ramblingly comic one-acts? (Up front confession: I had to step out of the theater for Meg Bashwiner's "The Magnificent Meg Sees All," which confronts her "psychic" great-grandmother with the question, "Do you think it's possible to be a fraud and still be a good person?" and concludes that life -- and the future -- is more about the little moments than the big ones. Sorry to have missed it.)

Here's an interesting fact. When you started reading this review, you were in the past. The sentence you're reading now takes place in the present, but before you finish it, it will have been in the future. This is the sort of logic gaming that playwrights Joey Rizzolo and Christopher Loar enjoy humorously tripping through, but the presentation between their two plays is miles apart and serves as a perfect example of the variety one finds in any given night with the New York Neo-Futurists. Rizzolo's "Tempus Umbra" uses a shadow-play format and a snappy, pattering dialogue to discuss existence and time-travel; Loar's "The Theoretical Physics of Procrastination," features three deadpan and dour (though there is a dance break) versions of Loar (two pre-recorded on the televisions rubbling the stage, all dubbed with a Robotic Hawking voice) discussing the "undeniable reality that this play has indeed already been written."

Of course, not everything always hits home. Adam Smith's "Box" gets points for establishing a creepy, crank-flashlight-powered atmosphere as he detoxes from his digital dependence in an electric-less future, but his conclusion about what really matters is perhaps a little too cute or twee -- a consequence, perhaps, of trying to distill deep thoughts into a fifteen-minute short. Likewise, there are some good jokes (and unbridled performances from the playwrights) in Daniel McCoy and Ricardo Gamboa's self-explanatorily titled "An Introduction to the Future of an Expanding Universe as Applicable to Queer Culture, Pop Culture, and Culture Club," but here's a campy theme that perhaps runs on a little too long. 

Timing issues aside, On the Future still serves as an excellent showcase of the Neo-Futurist aesthetic, and proves that while it's possible they may someday run out of ideas -- in the future, anything is possible -- they're still scratching the aesthetic surface in the present. Even a piece like Eevin Hartsough's informative "(Y)Our IMMEDIATE Survival Strategy," which has shades of a bit from a previous show of theirs --  (un)afraid -- has an entirely original (and clever) presentation, in the way it incorporates bits of fear-mongering TV clips from the past to warn us about the future. If you take Hartsough's word (and mine) for it, there are two things that are guaranteed about that future: In the future, something will happen. And if that something is you spending eighty minutes at On the Future, that'll be a good something.

THEATER: Violence Is Hard to Understand, So Let's Be Vague and Comedic About It

Photo/Sandra Coudert

Writer/director Adam Rapp's latest play, Through the Yellow Hour, has once again transformed the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater: one enters through a narrow graffitied corridor as blue-bonneted women stamp zeroes onto your neck and solemnly tell you that "You have been accounted for." Passing through a curtain made of garbage bags, the interior is a bombed-out ruin: the stage's ceiling has caved in, the walls are stripped and rusty, and emergency bulbs are strung across the walls like a most decidedly unfestive series of Christmas lights. Percussive gunfire echoes through invisible surround-sound speakers; the sound of explosions shake through the floor's subwoofer. There is, incidentally, a body on stage, sprawled in a drug-induced stupor by the clawed leg of a bathtub.

We're at some point in the future, in what remains of Ellen's (Hani Furstenberg) Lower East Side apartment; if the stakes are not already set high enough by Andromache Chalfant's amazing set design and Christian Frederickson's haunting soundscape, the play begins with Ellen shooting an insane intruder (Brian Mendes) and leaving his corpse in the corner -- "He adds texture to the room," she jokes, grimly. And so long as Rapp remains vague about things, focused more on the micro -- day-to-day survival -- and less on the macro -- the potentially Muslim "Egg Heads" who attacked the United States with germs and proceeded to castrate the men -- these textures are more than evocative enough to carry us Through the Yellow Hour.

In the first of three scenes, Ellen, a former nurse, barters for the infant child of Maude (Danielle Slavick), and it's a heartbreaking introduction to the dire toughness both women have bottled up within them. They have each turned to self-medication and have bartered their sex as needed, and the line between the two -- if any -- seems arbitrarily defined by the fact that Ellen has a stash of drugs, supplies, and a half-functional weapon. In the equally effective second scene, Hakim (Alok Tewari), brings news of the death of Ellen's husband -- with whom he was tortured and castrated -- and we see the depths of her determination as she forces Hakim, at gunpoint, to provide every detail of their treatment, even as she retches, weeps, and collapses to the floor. In a Dilaudid-dosed dreamstate, time -- and reality -- slips away.

The third and final scene, however, is on far shakier territory, and exposes the dangers of having a vague plot, a drifting story, a "lost" world. The theme is clear: whereas Ellen originally clung to the idea of having the baby that she and her husband had not been able to (and now might never have the opportunity to) conceive, she can no longer stomach having a child on her own, and turns instead to angelically untouched visitors (Joanne Tucker and Matt Pilieci) from a eugenics-like farm that aims to rebreed and rebuild the world, trading them her baby for a fourteen-year-old boy. (By which I mean an innocent, still-functioning penis.) Beyond the fact that this is a screaming deus ex machina that violates the internal logic of the play, the scene itself lacks the human connection produced by the claustrophobic scenes that preceded it (the second scene takes place largely in the dark), and falls too easily into a benevolent poetry. It also calls far too much attention to the unfleshed Big Ideas of the play -- War, Hope, Survival -- and the fact that Rapp has nothing new to say about them.

The same can be said for Jon Kern's Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them, which I didn't like any more when it was written by Christopher Durang and called Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. (To be clear, they're different plays. Also, a slight disclaimer: I briefly worked alongside Jon Kern at a former job.) The play doesn't officially open until October 17th, so take some if not all of the following with a grain of salt, but this slapstick-y production, which asserts that its aim is to humanize its trio of terrorists -- young would-be-martyr Rahim (Utkarsh Ambudkar), embittered supporter Yalda (Nitya Vidyasagar), and the delusional brains of the operation, Qala (William Jackson Harper) -- never really manages to slow down enough to connect. Throw in their stoner neighbor, Jerome (Steven Boyer), who believes that he's finally found a purpose, and the whole thing is just a joke factory. Strong as the performances might be, Peter DeBuois's broad direction hasn't yet found a way to focus on the sweetness shared between Rahim and Yalda, nor has it managed to find a way to pave over the gaping plotholes required to keep Jerome onstage.

The problem with Modern Terrorism is that it attempts to be taken seriously -- which is a bit like expecting an episode in which Bart befriends an innocent boy whose parents are plotting to overload Springfield's nuclear reactor to actually mean something. (I bring this up because Kern now writes on the staff of The Simpsons). I'm a huge fan of William Jackson Harper; that his portrayal of Qala reeks so utterly of Wile E. Coyote seems more a failing of the script than the actor. (The same might be said of the shades of Scooby-Doo's Shaggy in Boyer's role.) The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity used the buffoonery of professional wrestling to actually make a point; Modern Terrorism can't stop snickering at the sight of Rahim wearing a tightly-pinching underwear bomb, or at his cultural obsession with Star Wars -- at least, not long enough to give emotional weight to the fact that Yalda's innocent husband was accidentally blown up by an American missile, or that culture can just as easily unite as divide us.

It's not as if the play's final image -- two humans (nothing more, nothing less) huddled together, sharing a song through an iPod -- isn't an effective one. It's merely that, even with blood seriously splattered across a wall, it feels stale and unearned. We shouldn't just "get" the message of the play -- it should sneak up on us.