metaDRAMA: Theater in 2009

How Soon Is Now
This play was so good, I actually offered to pay for people's tickets; the gimmick to this modern "Peter and the Wolf" involved getting the audience physically involved and invested in the process. The show begins as a lantern-lit walk through the pitch-dark second floor of a being-renovated church, with ambient sounds and shapes wafting up from the stage; it then builds as the Wolf runs through the audience, forcing members of the audience to help the cast pin him down. Thus involved--and pulse-poundingly kept there by the live band and the potent choreography--we are implicated as judge, jury, and executioner, forced to consider our own morality (and perhaps mortality) long after the show is done.

Call Cutta in a Box
I have already forgotten the name of the representative from India who guided me through this one-audience show, but I will never forget the experience, and all that's sort of the point. Who stops to consider the outsourced labor on a tech support call? Or bothers to empathize with the employee who may be just as frustrated as you? There are whole lives and worlds out there, beyond the ones we encounter each day, and both technology and theater have the ability to make us more aware and open to that--so both should.

Aftermath
Also raising awareness--and the bar--was Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's collage of interviews with ordinary Iraqi citizens, a reminder of the human costs of war. We tend to generalize, but this show, thanks to its exceptional cast, reminded us that there are individuals everywhere you go, from smug dermatologists to scrappy artists, from married chefs trying to make due to imams who cannot simply be stereotyped, or who may have reasons--like being unjustly tortured--for their anger. It's powerful stuff.

The Pride of Parnell Street
Equally powerful is this slow yet richly paced play from Sebastian Barry, an intimate look into the lives of two people who are struggling--on account of their shared past--to get past their shared past. Despite being so soaked in memories--or perhaps because of it--the show remains very much grounded in the forward momentum of the present; that is, that we can only go forward. Barry's honesty reminds us how to do so; at a time when America prides itself in the smug, self-absorbed, misanthropic anti-hero Who Nonetheless Gets Things Done (how Objectivist), it is terrific to see Aidan Kelly and Mary Murry, in the true Irish style, reminding us of the importance of the flawed hero.

Krapp, 39
Speaking of flaws, Michael Laurence managed to get rid of all of his by embracing them. His goal--to record the thirty-nine-year-old portion of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the age of 39, and to then use it to fuel his performance in thirty years--not only revealed a lot about the sort of investment it takes to be an actor, but about how important the minutiae are; blink and you've missed your entire life. Fail to properly record a memory, and perhaps its gone forever. It was a meta-existential crisis, and all the better for its honesty and grace.

circle mirror transformation
Of course, no show was better at being honest this year than Annie Baker's new play. There was no exposition, no real "plot," and the pacing--six theater classes--was intentionally slow, to "mirror," if you will, what those classes are all about. (Self-discovery, learning to really listen, and more importantly, to really communicate.) And yet, through that, each character still grows--drastically--by actually doing what the play, and the class-within-a-play, demonstrate. It was the highlight of the year, for me.

Striking!

• Clay MacLeod Chapman's Pumpkin Pie Show is still going strong, with his eerie monologues once again turning to huge disasters: in the case of Commencement, it's a school shooting, and Hannah Cheek's portrayal of three forever-affected bystanders will stick with you.
  
  
• On a lighter note, Matthew A. J. Gregory and his company managed to produce a contemporary farce, The Hypochondriac, by working off Moliere's classic (The Imaginary Invalid); their intimate space--an actually posh two-floor apartment--sold the conceit, but the actors, who had nowhere to hide, are the ones who really sold the reality of the comedy. It's best when actors don't play for laughs, after all.
  
  
• On the flip-side, selling the authenticity of this socioeconomic play, was the cast and crew of The Thickness of Skin, which actually managed to be frightening on a physical level, thanks to Michael Chenevert's desperate, uninhibited performance.

Beautiful!

• Granted, Qui Nguyen's Soul Samurai was derivative of a half-dozen film genres, and yet, as a work of theater blending all of those together, it wound up being its own animal, and being the most effective of Nguyen's plays yet. Polished, engaging, and with terrific performances (including the rising Paco Tolson), you couldn't ask for much more.
  
  
• Company XIV's Austin McCormick is also openly derivative--except that most audiences don't know what baroque dance is. Gaudy, but not tacky; burlesque, but not sloppy; picturesque, but not static, all three parts of his ambitious, genre-spanning Apple Trilogy were terrific, though a special shout out to Le Serpent Rouge!
  
  
• And don't forget August Schulenberg's great ensemble piece, The Lesser Seductions of History, which pilfered an entire decade of United States history, processed it with the once-removed eyes of Our Town, and then truly made us feel the significance of big moments via the small, individual moments that are constantly shaping us (even as we otherwise miss them).

Original!

• I can't leave out Josh Conkel's absurdly effective MilkMilkLemonade, in which talking chickens, terrified narrators, evil twins, and gender-reversed casting drive home the point that everything we do in life is the fulfillment of one role or another. Why not, then, choose the ones that make us happy, even if that involves becoming the next Andrew Dice Clay?
  
  
• Likewise, Young Jean Lee's tricksy The Shipment, which used exaggerated vignettes to demonstrate the ways in which--whether we play to type or against it--we are still just playing, and should never be dismissed or simply taken at face value. Depth, people, depth.
  
  
• And then, nailing the allegorical warnings of science-fiction, there was Ashlin Halfnight's Artifacts of Consequence, which explores what (of art) is truly important, and worth preserving, once everything else has vanished. What--in other words--is the point of living in a world in which only Twinkies have lasted? Thankfully, this production was nowhere near as blunt as this encapsulation.

Honorable Mentions!
Jailbait was a witty, villain-less play about growing up; Powerhouse was an inventive bio-drama that presented itself in the style of its subject; Electric Pear's Synesthesia '09 was an interpretive masterwork of collaboration; and Daniel Robert's Haunted House was an ode to the simpler, perhaps happier, days of childhood, before technology turned us all into smug, cynical, know-it-alls.

Clarification!
Yes, I saw Broadway shows this year. They're not up in the list above because they didn't stay with me. And of the shows that are on my list, none of them would work on Broadway (some of them don't even work in a theater). Which is sort of the point I'm making. With the exception of Sarah Ruhl's In The Next Room...or, the Vibrator Play, which had lively subject material, terrific acting, and a fabulously directed ending, most of what I saw was being played to such a big audience that it couldn't help but be a bit "broad." (I'm looking at you, Superior Donuts.) What's effective from a technical standpoint--like the television segments of Memphis--isn't as emotionally affective as it should be.

And though there were outstanding performances, like Christopher Fitzgerald's leprechaun in Finian's Rainbow, it was rare that the whole show fit together. To be fair, off-off and off-Broadway had more than their share of outright flops and follies--percent-wise, Broadway's probably doing better, even if their shows are still losing money--but at least many of those failures come from taking big risks--risks that have, for some of these companies, now started to really reward their audiences.

2009 wasn't a bad year for theater. It was a bad year for Broadway. I'm hoping everyone steps their game up in 2010; I'm looking forward to it either way. I'll see you all again on January 6th, 2010, to kick off coverage of the Under the Radar Festival. Happy New Year!

Snow White

Photo/Daniel Perez

It's important to stress that this is a complement, especially to those unfamiliar with Company XIV's work, but their triumphant new show, a family-friendly "baroque infused" version of Snow White is Austin McCormick at his worst. Which is really to say that McCormick can do no wrong. Even though his hands are somewhat tied with all the pandering and mugging to the kids lounging on a series of pillows in the front row--he still manages to paint compelling stage pictures without the erotic tension of Le Serpent Rouge or the burlesqued energy of The Judgment of Paris.

How impressive is McCormick's aesthetic? He manages to get kids to listen, raptly, to the three-toned a capella of Charities (Brooke Bryant, Brett Umlauf, and Amber Youell), who are the voice of the Magic Mirror, and to watch Snow White (Yeva Glover) dance a chaste balletic solo. At the same time, he convinces the adults to bear with dim shadow-puppet dwarves by having the Narrator (Nick Fessette) show off his range of voices, and helps us deal with the necessarily repetitious bits by showcasing the Wicked Queen (Gioia Marchese) and her wide variety of glowers and gloats. His art--and let's call it that--strikes an elegant balance between highs and lows: contemporary music backing a gypsy-themed dance; exaggerated acting from the Queen's ruses that's well-matched by the crisp, militarily precise dancing that backs it up.

And then, of course, his images, somehow managing to hold up even against the staying power of a Grimm fairy tale. When the Huntsman takes Snow White into the woods, a hart lopes by, elegant and strong. When the Queen brings Snow White a poisonous comb, it is with a troupe of dancers every bit as silly as their French wigs, including one who appears to be nothing more than a head on a pedestal. No longer is Snow White put in a silly glass coffin: instead, she sleeps, dead, in the arms of a tree, cradled near a luminous chandelier. The best moment comes when Snow White, lost in the woods, is caught by the sprites of the wood as a gentle snow blankets them. (The manipulation of the lead actor is either a staple of the baroque style or a signature move of McCormick's: either way, it's most welcome.)

There aren't "flaws" in this production of Snow White so much as there are limits. Though he stretches the story to accommodate various styles of dance (and certainly of wardrobe), it's not as free as the previous two parts of Company XIV's "Apple Trilogy," nor is it as interactive with the audience (which is surprising, given that many of them are children). And cool ideas, like the baroque opera trio, sour over time, a too-static piece of an otherwise fluid world. Snow White may not measure up to McCormack's other work, but that must not hold you back: it's still absolutely enchanting.

Terrible Things

"You're trying to pass your self-absorption off as a metaphysical experiment," says Katie Pearl, speaking as her Dad speaking to herself, so that much is true of Terrible Things. "You need to comprehend limits," she (as him) continues, "which is why you shouldn't do theater." This statement, on the other hand, is entirely false. Katie Pearl, who has created this project with her collaborator of fourteen years, Lisa D'Amour, and the help of choreographer Emily Johnson, should be doing theater. In fact, the problem with Terrible Things is that Pearl does understand limits. Too few terrible things happen and the action that does occurs is too tightly controlled by Johnson's choreography and by the audience's distance from the action to provide the immersion Pearl's chasing, a world in which every possible outcome is happening (and in which, therefore, anything and everything can happen).

The result is that things happen. Pearl, speaking via headset, connects some of these to her childhood dreams of being a ballerina, her relationship with her "action-figure" mother, and her ex-girlfriends (including Barbara), but even when she's directly speaking about things, it comes across in a refracted way to the audience, bent by the images present on stage. (This was highly effective in the last PearlDamour production I saw, Bird Eye Blue Print, but that site-specific work had no stage, and therefore no room for distance or refraction.) To that end, D'Amour has conjured up some excellent images (as she did in Stanley (2006)), using flip-panels with three-dimensional images to play with space, and various colors (yellows and reds) to snap us out of the black and white world we start in.

Sure, you could take Terrible Things as a communal out-of-body experience, with Pearl taking us along with the ride. That would explain the neat arrangement of marshmallows (like tiny, yummy graves) spread across the floor, and the fish-like way in which three dancers slowly sweep them off into piles. (If "explain" is the right word, that is. I recognize that that's not necessarily the point, but also that the play's tectonic drifts can make the audience restless, too.) That is, it allows for Jiu Jitsu wrestlers--the only male presence in this world--to face off with Pearl, and then--mid-frame, for everything to freeze and allow her to scurry out, but to what end? Here's where those nagging limits come back into play, reminding us that it is a play, that it is meant to provoke a response, or have an effect, as opposed to being the sort of infinite waking dream it wants to be.

Then again, the mind's the truly terrible thing to waste, and it's nice to see such creative muscles being flexed. If only it handled its beautiful surprises more compellingly.

The Great Recession

Employment may be down, but personalities are up, thanks to The Great Recession, an anthology of six world premieres from downtown luminaries, commissioned to write about money. The price--$25, with dollar beers at intermission--is right. So is the striking variety of voices: a manic Adam Rapp seems calm next to an over-the-top Thomas Bradshaw; a thoughtful Will Eno looks much deeper beside a brash Itamar Moses; and a sweet Erin Courtney makes the relentless Sheila Callaghan all the more heartbreaking. If one's not your thing, another will be, and as a tightly performed evening they collectively accomplish the soothing/numbing task of taking your mind elsewhere. (Call it the PBR effect.)

Given the stylistic tics each author has, the short-play format actually suits them all best. Adam Rapp's longer works may buckle to maintain their credibility (as the characters increasingly lose their integrity), but his Twilight Zone-y "Classic Kitchen Timer" works perfectly. We need not explain the Host (Nick Maccarone), who looks, sounds, and acts a lot like Heath Ledger's version of the Joker, nor his cadre of capitalism-condemning cronies; instead, we can appreciate what they bring out of their "guest," Lucy Norwood (Sarah Ellen Stephens). Slowly, the significance of objects on the stage comes into focus: the knife plunged into a watermelon; the crying, unattended baby in its carriage; and of course, the ticking, insistent egg-timer, set for twelve tension-filled minutes.

It's unfortunate that Itamar Moses has to follow, with his blatant, unsubtle, and frankly unoriginal "Fucked." Reed (Dorien Makhloghi) wants to break up with Cindy (Jessica Pohly) while remaining the nice guy, only to dig himself into a deeper and deeper hole. It's true that there's no "right" way to break up with someone, but there is a "wrong" way to write a play, and that's when you make an unpolitical drama seem like agitprop.

On the other hand, this brief dip allows the provocateur, Thomas Bradshaw, to make a nice counterpoint: in his grossly exaggerated "New York Living," relationships between people are almost entirely monetary, so when Jen (Morgan Reis) stops having sex with Jeff (Raul Sigmund Julia), he throws her out: "If you're not going to fuck me, then at least blow me or let me titty fuck you." This compounds his problems as an actor; he can't stop getting erections in the middle of his scenes with Adrian (Anna Greenfield), and while she initially feels harassed by Jeff and the boundary-pushing director, David (Andy Gershenzon), she eventually gives in. Costs aren't the only thing we cut, and Bradshaw cuts to the bone when he talks about ethics.

Erin Courtney's "Severed" and Sheila Callaghan's "Recess" are at opposite ends of the spectrum, too. Courtney uses testimonials to opine about America ("Do you think America could have elected a black man if the market hadn't crashed? America does care about color; the color green!") while getting personal in the foreground, in a sweet encounter between the all-business Suit (Ronald Washington) and the more artistic Polka Dot (Amy Jackson). It ends on an uplifting note; even if things are bad, we can choose to see the best in it. Not so with Callaghan's bleak vision of "today"(/the future), in which civilization seems to have broken down within a crowded studio apartment--a girl lies dead in a puddle of her own blood, another exercises herself to death, a third satisfies the sexual urges of the queue outside her crude tarp. The "happy" moment here is when they all come together to share two links of sausage, exciting one another with a description of delicious, fancy food. It's hard to think of us being in a recession after seeing what a true, Katrina-like, collapse would look like, and there are few playwrights able to be as anarchic in plot as they are in their writing (while still being poetic). Special credit to Kip Fagan for directing the myriad pieces.

The final piece of the evening, Will Eno's "Unum" wraps everything up by following the course of a dollar bill from the US Mint through the hands of many interconnected people. Jim Simpson makes a bold statement in his direction by having each character linger on stage long after the money has moved on--echoes? memories? both?--but the play emphasizes the way in which we truly are all connected, by needs, wants, and the color of our green, green blood. It's impossible to really point out any one specific thing about The Great Recession as a body of work--it's meant to showcase diverse works and words--but that last image of the 4o-odd Bats on stage at once, bowing, is a good a point as any. We are all in this together.

metaDRAMA: The Dangers of Group Think

Not that this is an surprise, but in the latest issue of Wired magazine, Clive Thompson reports on an experiment run by Duncan Watts and Matthew Salganik which basically showed that if enough people told you, in advance, that a product was good, then you would be inclined to like it. Similarly, if enough people told you it was bad, you'd probably dislike it. This occurred even in their devious test, in which they lied about results: i.e., if you gave something five-stars, it was reported as one-star to everyone else, and vice-versa.

Now, for me, this isn't a problem. I never read a review before I see a show. Of course, this sets a rather odd double standard for myself, because I write reviews, and I'd sort of like people to read them. It's a difficult spot for theaters, too, because it illustrates how dangerous opinions can be--and, as the last year has shown, not necessarily those of critics, so much as those of an all-too-easily networked group of theatergoers. Especially those paying customers who couldn't wait to gossip about disastrous preview performances. A theater can't afford to get any negative buzz, and yet, it can't afford to not have any buzz. Worse, there are few shows--especially in theater--which totally satisfy audiences of all types. In other words, the findings of group think suggest that, to survive, theaters must go niche, culling audiences into like-minded masses, and then giving them exactly what they want.

This isn't a scientific result; I'm spit-balling. But user ratings everywhere are everywhere these days, from Audience Extras to nytimes.com. I worry, because those tiny, gold-starred pictures are not worth a thousand words, and the more that people stop thinking about what they're going to see--or thinking about what they've just seen--the faster the theater community will erode. What's the solution? Well, for me, it was the choice to abolish grades and stars this year--I let the reviews speak for themselves--and the attempt to encourage discussion on this site; i.e., to open up the blog as a place for conversation about a show, not just a place in which my word could be law. It doesn't always work, but as we head into 2010, and I start my fourth year as a theater critic, you can be sure I'll keep looking. I hope you'll join me; not as a group, but as individuals.