The Footage

Photo/Joan Marcus

Perception is a funny thing. The footage on screen is grainy, and hard to see. But, it's of a hot young girl in a white wife-beater, posing on a chair. Then again, she's handcuffed to the chair and crying. But, these clips go up every day on YouTube, and they've got a LonelyGirl15-level following, so maybe it's not real. It seems the girl is innocent, and in pain. Maybe she's not, maybe she's a masochist. A discussion on semiotics--the true meaning behind the signs that we see, i.e., is your red the same as my red--is the last thing you'd expect of Joshua Scher's dark drama, The Footage, but it's just one in a series of pleasant surprises.

Scher has an ear for language, and this helps him navigate his bumpy, multi-perspective narrative. Whether it's whimpering video clips of this so-called "death porn" footage; a real-world love story between lonely Alexa (Rachel McPhee) and JC (Michael Guagno), a reserved runaway; or even comically anachronistic machinima, in which video from "HellCraft" (I assume there's a legal issue) is edited and dubbed to make the characters talk about Jamba Juice, the characters sound real. Maya (Caroline Hurley) delivers blogs in monologue form, worrying about the implications of voyeurism that makes us implicit in a crime; her boyfriend, Chance (Jamie Effros), a filmmaker stuck doing TV, is struck by the brilliance of it, morals be damned; and the kidnapped Delilah (Elizabeth Alderfer) is a victim, but not necessarily as you expect. More surprisingly, for such a heavy theme, Scher is able to work in ROFLMAO (pronounced "roffle mao," meaning Rolling On Floor, Laughing My Ass Off) comedy by stressing the online flirting between Chance's "l33t" gamer of a roommate, Ethan (Michael Micalizzi) and Alexa's germaphobic roommate, Lauren (Blair Baker).

What's most surprising is that for a play which stresses the line between what's real and what's not, so much of the acting seems real. Even Dodge (Nicolas Flower), a friend of Chance's who is crashing for a week as he gets over a text-messaged break-up, sounds believable, even if the things that happen to him are both irrelevant and artificial. As for the rest of the cast, they all get a few moments to develop beyond their broader stereotypes--Guagno reveals a darker side, Hurley thinks outside the blog, and Baker and McPhee spend a wonderful scene getting baked together, talking about why hitting on an avatar is better than talking to a random guy at a bar. It's not just a clever moment, it's original, too.

Given all these good moments, it's an unfortunate surprise to find that the ending is more than a little contrived, although director Claudia Zelevansky finds an artistic way to handle it (as she does with Adrian Jones's budget-appropriate set). Giving The Footage such a neat ending fights the impulses of the entire show; trust Ethan, instead, who nails it when he says, of his online relationship, "I know it wasn't real real . . . But I had enough to fill in the blanks." All Scher needs is one more change in perception, just something a little more grainy at the end.

Wintuk (via Goldstar)

There's magic blowing through the air. It might only look like flimsy pieces of paper "snow," and you can see the high-powered vent sending them through the theater in a Slava's Snowshow burst, can see the Sunday in the Park With George-level digital backdrop. But from the moment the first Cirque du Soleil performer slaloms down a hill, across an angled path center stage, and then back up a hill on the other side, you're a kid again, being utterly swept away. Wintuk is an aesthetic, intimate circus: there are no animals, and no high-flying acts. Instead, the focus is on the capacity of the human body to astound, whether through the first act's crazy gymnastic flips and acrobatic balancing acts or the second act's more subdued contemporary dances, the sort that make your single hula hoop seem lame, or shame you for not being able to climb a rope, let alone spin through the air and gyrate on one. It's also on the capacity of the human mind to imagine things: hence actors on stilts bring giant bird creatures to life, and bunraku artists lurk in the backdrop of giant ice golems that march across the stage as the actors sing foreign choral music. It is, admittedly, both an exciting and alien experience, and, as always, it is utterly spellbinding. Of particular note: a clever contortionist routine that gives new meaning to the word "rag doll" and an ever more precarious balancing act atop a tower of rolling pins. Of no importance: the plot, which introduces five breakdancing actors in dog costumes and a clown trapped in a garbage can. It's a whimsical breath of fresh air; go.

As you'll note above, I attended this performance as a guest of Goldstar, a new ticketing service that provides discounted tickets to theater (among other city events). Had I not been a guest, the normally $99.00 ticket would have cost me $59.00, plus a $7.50 service fee, a price that I would gladly pay to see the next Cirque du Soleil performance. (I'd also recommend checking out their DVD as a holiday gift; it doesn't beat the real thing, but this anniversary collection proudly demonstrates just how many different ways there are to stage the same types of basic theater, as well as how much more talented performers have grown--or at least, how much more successfully daring--in the last twenty years.) The next time a show comes around that I can't get tickets for, I would certainly look to Goldstar for cheaper tickets, not to mention their community reviews.

The Most Damaging Wound

Photo/Deanna R. Frieman

The Most Damaging Wound opens with a stream of curses--"Fucking, fucking, fucking say it, G"--and a flood of Jagermeister shots, but director Mark Armstrong ritualizes these excesses into an utterly realistic depiction of male friendship. Better still, Blair Singer's script takes its characters far more seriously than Howard Korder's Boy's Life, and its dialogue is more grown up than the sort of glib posturing that one finds in works like Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things. (This is surprising, considering that Singer recently wrote for Weeds.) The secret seems to be the underlying pedigree, an epigraph from Robert Bly's Iron John: "[W]hat do men do? Collect in a bar to hold light conversations over light beer . . . Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging wound of all."

At first, all that energetic drinking conceals those wounds: on the surface, this is a play about five friends reuniting (after ten years) to have one last night of childish fun before they burn the past and become "men." But directly beneath that is a largely unspoken fear--hence the liquid courage--that they are not ready, and for that, Kenny (Ken Matthews) has called them together: a night of male bonding may not help him get over his fears of being a father, but he needs to have his "quest for masculinity" understood by other men. This leads to some rather brave revelations, the sort that aren't normally seen on stage. For instance, when Christine (Megan McQuillan) intrudes on their gathering, it becomes clear that Alan (Michael Szeles) is having an affair, but that's not what gets Kenny's goat: it's that Alan didn't confide in him.

The whole thing is naturally done, however, with small things slipping out between big comedic anecdotes--like where Dicky (Chris Thorn) was before his wedding--or rowdy singalongs to "Closer to Fine" that serve to illustrate just how tight these friends are. GG (Michael Solomon) spends most of the play being a cypher, trying to make sure that his soon-to-be restaurant isn't totally wrecked by the party, until it comes out that his desire to be a "best friend" has made him somewhat shy. If you went a second time, you'd catch the side glances, but it's best to be caught off guard by their realism (after all, why would true friends wink to the audience?). In the highlight of the evening, Dicky--the sort of crass drunk who is nonetheless the life of the party--sobers up enough to finally confront Bo (Bard Goodrich), who had been his best friend before he disappeared without a word seven years ago. Chris Thorn's performance is fantastic throughout the night, filled with hundreds of tics and tremors, but it's here, a perfectly ambiguous moment when he goes to kiss Bo (who is gay), that he is outstanding: that vulnerability is rarely seen, especially from someone who has moaned his way through taking a crap earlier in the night.

The result of all this outstanding acting, superb pacing, and impeccable direction is a show that is genuinely surprising. It's also incredibly personal, especially if you're sitting in the first row, stage left, a foot or so from the actors. Armstrong, who has worked in small spaces before, makes the most of the Manhattan Theater Source space, putting action off-stage, or from outside April Bartlett's set, as seen through a "window." The end result is that it all seems very lived in, which is to say that it goes beyond being plausible to feeling concrete--not just the "Hey, I have friends like that" effect, but the "I feel exactly the same way" connection. The most damaging wound, then, would be the theater community's self-inflicted one if this play fails to transfer.

If You See Something, Say Something

Photo/Kenneth Aaron

Forget the superficial description of Mike Daisey--Spalding Grey meets Chris Farley says so little--and don't worry about whether or not If You See Something, Say Something, his latest monologue, is worth seeing: it is. If you like storytelling, and you must if you like theater, then it hardly matters how Daisey acts or what he talks about, so long as he remains charismatic, vivacious, and funny: he does.

You go to see this sort of perfomer, a sit-down comic with considerably more gravitas (and sure enough, they're making a movie), because he has an ability to say what's on your mind, often in a way that is far cleverer and certainly funnier than you yourself would put it. But that's only half the picture, the cultural magnet part that describes a junk shop in New Mexico as Mad Max meets Brazil. The far more engaging half is the indignant Daisey, offended on your behalf, at the museum that announces, to a soundtrack that is Shaft meets electronica, that "Native Americans were happy to give us their land." The Daisey who is horrified by the way we unabashedly claim that saving one million hypothetical American lives in the Pacific was worth more than 200,000 Japanese women and children, and then go about erasing the actual deaths, turning our nation's nuclear history into a bloodless affair. As he puts it, smiling ever so slightly and then going back to a straightface that belies his depth, "We like to think of ourselves as the good guys."

The only complaint about If You See Something, Say Something is a moot one: the monologue may be artificially constructed, but it's performed to perfection. Daisey knows that his work is strongest when he speaks from personal experience; his description of a Seattle garage theater production of The Balcony (in How Theater Failed America) is an indelible moment. It's hardly wrong for the man, then, to go out into the world, all Michael Moore-like, in search of an experience that he can plug into the research he's done. Given that, his monologue consists not just of things that he's experienced (security theater at the airport) but things that he's subjected himself to (going to the Trinity test site). It is rounded out both by his research (the moral feud over atomic weapons between Sam Cohen and Herman Kahn, delivered in a fashion that the History Channel would do well to note) and by what most likely triggered this monologue, his strongest moments on stage: what he's disgusted by (Homeland Security, and its Skeletor-looking Michael Chertoff).

If You See Something, Say Something is a political play in the first-person, a unique trait that allows it to be socially responsible on a collective scale. It is first-rate theater, too--a direct story, with no mixed messages, that reminds us all of the very power we have to say something.

Paul Auster, "Man in the Dark"

"[W]hen sleep refuses to come . . . I lie in bed and tell myself stories. They might not add up to much, but as long as I'm inside them, they prevent me from thinking about the things I would prefer to forget." So speaks August Brill, who escapes his crippled life as a 74-year-old widower by fantasizing of Owen Brick, a party magician who finds himself tasked--in an alternate America that is at war with itself--with killing the man who has created this world: August Brill. Dip that pen a bit deeper, and you'll see that Man in the Dark is just an extension of Paul Auster (no metafictional stranger: he goes way back to City of Glass) telling himself stories about a violent war that he can control, so that he doesn't have to face the America that he can't.

To aid in this distraction, there are the usual Austerian topics: films are discussed (The Bicycle Thief, Grand Illusion, and The World of Apu), philosophers are mulled (Giordano Bruno), and literature is imagined (Rose Hawthorne's memoir). But in trodding over such familiar themes (Brick's adventures resemble a cheap noir) and focusing so much on the ideal of using "inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions," the book falls flat. Auster's prose has always been written in a procedural fashion, but here it seems professorial, too, and we are too often told things like "Brick is feeling so lonely, so discombobulated by the events of the past twenty hours, he wishes she would abandon her post behind the counter and accompany him to the hotel, but he knows she can't, and he's too timid to ask her to make an exception for him." Worse still, this short 180-page novel devotes half its space to this truly imaginary character--in fact, even pages to an alternative history that only stresses the distracted state both Auster and Brill find themselves in. Philip Roth wrote of another country in The Plot Against America to illustrate something frightening about the world today; Auster writes of another world because he's bored of this one. Poor him. Poor us.

Thing is, the rest of the novel isn't bad. Brill doesn't just dream of Brick's dead-end life, he remembers--with lived-in details that specify right down to the special deals on dinner rolls--people from his family. His sister, Betty, leads him to think about her marriage to Gilbert Ross, and consequently to describe Gil's life--from the Newark riots in the 60s to his law practice in California and the "more than twenty pills a day to keep himself alive." In eight pages, Auster fleshes out two full lives and uses them to reflect upon his protagonist's own situation, so is it any wonder that the sections with Brick seem so irritatingly leaden?

Ultimately, Man in the Dark turns into the sort of book Gilead might've been if it were a dialogue, with Brill talking to his granddaughter, Katya, about how he'd married, divorced, and then reunited with her mother. It's a happy story, another distraction in the dark, meant to turn Katya's grief away from the love of her life's death in Iraq. All of us are in the dark, goes the logic, and we must all of us turn to stories to save us. So far as one's reading a book goes, however, why would anyone want to stay in the dark?