Liberty City

Maybe every child should have to attend a school where they're in the 1% minority; maybe we should all have to watch our parents divorce and lose faith, live through race-incited riots, or have our father chain us to the rusted remains of slave shackles. On second thought, scratch that: April Yvette Thompson is a one-of-a-kind performer. Even if we recreated the exact circumstances that molded her childhood, there'd never be another actress able to convey those stories with such honesty, comedy, heartache, and strength. Her one-woman show, Liberty City, is filled with unabashed pride and embarrassing details, and it's one of the strongest solo shows to grace the stage not just because it's brave, but because it's necessary. We've had richly performed shows like Bridge and Tunnel or I Am My Own Wife take center stage, but it's been a long time since seeing such a pure (albeit processed) and relevant show.

The show begins with Tal Yarden's mood-setting video collage of retro 70s-landscape sketches, bubbly depictions that make the grime seem homely, and then lights introduce us to the various homes of April's characters. From stage right: a salon chair, home for LaMarr, a talkative hairdresser; a kitchen, where the wizened Auntie Caroline will separate the nonsense from the truth; a cozy living room, indistinct save for an illustration of Black pride and perhaps some doorway dangling beads, in which we'll meet April's straight-talking father and her calm mother; and finally, Aunt Valerie's apartment, which has seen a few soul-shaking boogie nights. The physicality of Antje Ellermann's set is important: first, for the fences and brick walls that loom (as in the projection) behind the cozy facade; second, for the lack of borders, a casual environment that allows April to throw herself from one setting (or character) to another with the simple grace afforded only to the finest performers. Assisted by Jessica Blank's grounded direction, Mrs. Thompson smoothly propels herself between roles, ever growing the momentum and pace, until finally the tension erupts.

The last fourth of Liberty City takes these familiar, empathetic characters and pushes their narratives up against burning KMarts and National Guardsmen in the street. It's a powerful contrast between seeing her confident father go from talking about Santa ("Ain't no imaginary motherfucker gonna come down the chimney and give you shit") to being arrested for trying to cross the riot zone's border. (A frustrating situation that, as a political activist for civil liberties, he's often faced.) It's sad, too, to see her mother, a confident woman much like April, slowly lose herself as she joins a door-to-door church, looking for faith that has been slowly chiseled away by the system. Saddest of all is watching Caroline go from telling the story of how she raised April's father to having to explain how she deals with her own, when Valerie gets addicted to the crack that has blighted the neighborhood. And through all these bedraggled situations, April keeps her own head held high. Her father might be "looking like the poetry just walked out the door" after being harassed, but in Liberty City, the poetry is always there, a profound elegance found even in her father's cuss-laden speeches.

Early on, April's father explains that she has to go to an all-white private school "to learn the enemy's rules." It's a harsh observation, and probably accurate at the time, but it's presented even-handedly in the play -- the viewpoint of one of many very real characters -- and therefore avoids the pointlessness of blind accusation. By doing so, April Yvette Thompson has given us the chance to learn -- not from an enemy, but from a fellow human . . . who just happens to be a tremendous performer.

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FRIGID '08: Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm

Water, pouring into a glass. The oh so delicate vibrations caused by a finger circling the glass's rim. A chair, shifting. Drumstick forks, banging on pans or scratching across the table. The sound of mastication. A harpsichord in distress, its strings cringing beneath a violin's bow. If that's not avant-garde enough, add in the garbled recitations of found text from the Army Prayer Manual, world news reports, and Rae Armantrout's poetry. If Chuck Mee and Philip Glass collided, they'd be lucky to come up with something half as good as Rick Burkhardt's Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, a self-titled "piece for three speaking percussionists." Beyond the creative effect of the work (and god only knows what the notation looks like), the play conjures up a hollow Thanksgiving, stripping away all the festivity of life, leaving behind only the artifice of objects clinking and clashing against one another. It also mocks our ability to celebrate such sham holidays, content in our safe little houses even as -- half a world away -- the radio broadcasts, in graphic details, the blackened and cooked corpses of innocent children.

That's not all; Mr. Burkhardt and his colleagues from The Nonsense Company (Ryan Higgins and Andy Gricevich) have a second act, Conversation Storm, which skewers our laughingly hypothetical conversations about torture. What starts out as (Scene 1) a play about Hugh's insomnia soon becomes actively rewritten (Scene 12) into a comedy (think David Greenspan's She Stoops To Comedy) and then (Scene 20?) a bitter extrapolation of "the ticking time-bomb scenario," which pits Hugh and Alec against one another in a game of moral onedownsmanship. None of this, incidentally, is really done in chronological order, so the nightmarish nuclear holocaust (Scene 41?) is there, as is its juxtaposition with a quickly pattered recitation of some very swanky menu options (Scene 17?), some literal torture (Scene ?), and more.

It's amazing how human all three actors are, given the machine-like precision of their shifts between scenes, not to mention the seamless break between the first and second play. This is, no disrespect to any of the other shows in the FRIGID Festival, the play to see.

FRIGID '08: Diversey Harbor

There's not much theatrically going on in Annie Coburn's direction of Diversey Harbor, but she's really nailed down the acting, which in turn has cemented playwright Marisa Wegrzyn's very young, very talented voice. Her monologued play feels like a cross between Brooke Berman and Connor McPherson; I only wish that the ghost story she introduces late in the game tied more into the other loosely connected narratives, or better still, remained grounded in the sort of grim reality that can call craigslist "a dark alley littered with crack pipes," sum up a character with "I'm off to watch Jerry Springer with my thumb in my vagina," and honestly depict the cavalier attitude of some Lotharios: "It's entirely possible that I'm about to fuck up someone's life. And I can't wait." From the laid-back, drinking dog-walker James (Avery Pearson) to the selfish and angry Dennis (Dorien Makhloghi), to the high-strung Grace (Dana Berger) to the carefully poised and meticulous Stephanie (Amanda Sayle), Wegrzyn presents four very human chapters in life and loss, and, up until Stephanie's encounter with some muddy footprints, has a very funny and fresh look at kids today.

The Night of the Iguana

There's no confusion about what sort of Tennessee Williams play The Night of the Iguana is under Terry Schreiber's steady direction; from the first moments of thrusts and grunts, thinly veiled by the gauzy curtain of a rundown hotel room to the subsequent moments of quiet, mirthful dancing, it's clear that Mr. Schreiber is going to let Williams's physicality rule the day, and let the words follow. And follow they do: Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon sweats his way onto the stage, pursued by the girl he's screwed (Alecia Medley), her rigid protector (Pat Patterson), a wishy-washy bus driver (Ian Campbell Dunn), and the Creep, a miasmal presence that is leading him to his latest crackup, his next self-inflicted crucifixion (for which he has, you might say, a crucifixation). Water gushes out of a hand-pump, the Mexican pool boys (Armando Merlo and Guito Wingfield) jostle furniture around the veranda, and a group of German tourists noisily intrude whenever there's a moment's peace. (The play is set in 1940, though if the German presence is supposed to be political, it doesn't come across that way.) As the first act builds to a stormy climax, there's even strobe lightning and a downpour -- impressive (and again, very physical) staging for T. Schrieber Studio. If nothing else, The Night of the Iguana is at least operating on the realistic level, as Shannon might put it.

Madness thus established, Williams and Schrieber focus more closely on Shannon in the second act, particularly in his relation to Hannah Jelkes -- not just a fellow traveler or huckster, but a kindred soul, too. Maxine, recently widowed, would have Shannon by force, and she ties him to his restful hammock when he threatens to swim to China, but it's Hannah who sits beside him through the night, brewing poppy seed tea and speaking the plain truth, as calmly as possible, to Shannon about how one goes about coping with loneliness.

Both acts have their highs and lows -- Williams requires the same sort of endurance from the audience as he does of his characters -- but The Night of the Iguana is done great justice by its intimate, specific direction. As Maxine, Janet Sala hits the notes of both a dissatisfied nymph and of a desperate mother, and as Hannah, Denise Flore finds dignified grace and quiet sorrow. As for Shannon, it isn't until Derek Roche's tied to the hammock that he becomes more than the gesticulations of a wild man. For the last forty-five minutes, he's utterly captivating, moving from rage to sorrow to lethargy and then into a fugue-like depression.

Hannah advises Shannon to "accept whatever situation you cannot improve." But Terry Schreiber does her one better, and improves every situation that others might simply accept. The play is as genuinely funny as it is frustrating in the first act as Shannon squares off against all the demons, real and imagined, that besiege his innocent scamming. And in the quiet lulls of the second act, The Night of the Iguana finds a certain wide-eyed wondrousness in the eyes of characters stretched open by tears.

RUS(H)

Never before have I seen a play that manages so well to walk the jagged line between passion and violence. Why then must RUS(H) spend so much time drifting, not walking, sluggishly floating complex philosophical thoughts about sexuality and the soul's unclenched needs? At times, James Scruggs achieves a beauteous balance between his text and image, as when Rus (Luis Vega) recalls, in a flash of video screens puppeted around him, how he hit Sonny (Lathrop Walker) with a car. At others, disconnected images of jail corridors, shadowy figures, and oversized tape machines lend a pretentious air of gravitas to words that, on their own, would be more than enough. As the characters often ask, "I'm not bad. Aren't I enough?" I'm sure the script would ask the same of its creator if it weren't so often overwhelmed by the video.

Luckily, Scruggs and director Kristin Marting have given some legs to all the heady thoughts floating around out there: the play pulses to a Latin beat and the silent tangos reveal more about the dissolving relationship between Rus and his wife, Sireene (chandra thomas), than their lies do. And on the other side of Anabella Lenzu's choreography is Qui Nguyen, doing his darkest, most grown-up fight choreography. He brings a modern gladiator aesthetic to the simmering homo-erotic tension between Sonny -- whose overexposure to Tina (crystal meth) has dimmed his ability to feel pleasure (the dramaturg calls him an anhedonist) -- and Rus, who is so haunted by what seems to him as routine that he longs for uncharted territories. Additionally, many of the images take on lives of their own: four LCD screens are manipulated by 'video puppeteers' (Marc Bovino, Dax Valdes) who fragment, overlap, and meld their screens around or to the actor's bodies.

Even still, the play seems strangled by its own conventions: the strongest moments either relegate the images to a simple screen-saver background of over-magnified leaves, or abandon the shtick altogether, as when Mr. Walker -- by far the creepiest and most compelling part of RUS(H), with his empty eyes and menacing glare -- pleads with the audience to share some Tina, drawing uncomfortably (or too comfortably) near. (It's a poor -- and awkward -- choice when Mrs. thomas directly addresses us later.) These are moments of pure chemistry; some of the others, as Rus forlornly reflects, are chemical: pure artifice.

RUS(H) is perhaps too daring, then, for its own good: it overdoses on technology. But the side-effects are dark and captivating, and though the show isn't quite a rush, it's one hell of a bender.